How COVID-19 could reshape the federal public service

2020/04/24 Leave a comment

Too early to tell but the opportunities are there:

The COVID-19 pandemic has handed the public service a grand-scale opportunity to experiment with new ways of operating, including rethinking the need for massive office buildings in Ottawa-Gatineau and embracing digital government more fully. What public servants learn in the next few months by working remotely and in crisis could jolt the bureaucracy into a re-ordering of practices and culture that reformers haven’t been able to do in 25 years.

Public servants rapidly mobilized over the past month to implement a massive financial aid package, abandoning play-it-safe and rules-bound processes to put the needs of Canadians first as they doled out billions in emergency funding.

“It’s not that the crisis is forcing us to reshape the public service, but the post-pandemic world could be the window of opportunity, or necessity, to accelerate the renewal and reforms in institutions,” former privy council clerk Michael Wernick said in an interview.

Alex Benay, the former chief information officer who led the government’s digital agenda until he left for the private sector, wrote the crisis unleashed a “new norm,” the “digital first” government he’s long pressed for.

“Sadly, it took COVID-19 for people to realize that the real problem was not technology, not necessarily the culture…The real ‘enemy,’ so to speak, has been the operating model of government has yet to change to adjust to the new digital realities,” Benay wrote in a recent LinkedIn post.

Crises sparks change, but not always lasting change

It’s not the first time the public service has roared into action to combat a crisis. Its rapid response was reminiscent of the moves it made during the “program review” budgetary cuts of the 1990s, after the 9/11 attacks, and during the 2008-09 financial crisis, which had lasting impacts on government.

These events didn’t, however, fundamentally change the culture of the public service and many argue it went back to its old risk-averse and hierarchical ways as the crisis receded. That culture is hard-wired into public service, built on rules developed to keep governments accountable for the decisions they make with taxpayers’ money.

The public service has been slow to embrace technology that’s changing the private sector at breakneck speed. Bureaucrats have been pushed to innovate, to use digital tools to rethink how they work and deliver services, to take risks, and even to fail as they experiment with new ways of working.

Mel Cappe, who was Canada’s top bureaucrat in the aftermath of 9/11, said today’s public servants rightly opted to get emergency aid out to those who needed it over a “bullet-proof system” that ensured no mistakes at the front-end. The thinking was that errors could be fixed later.

It allowed the public service to take just two weeks to distribute employment insurance payments to 2.4 million applicants, the number it normally handles in a year. Money “going to people undeserving is an error I would rather have than depriving people of the money they need in crisis,” Cappe said in a podcast.

“Work will change and services will change. Why does a call centre have to have a building?” he said in an email. “Our expectations of the role of government have increased dramatically. New programs, new services, new bodies. But we have no idea what or how.”

A smaller, more distributed public service?

Long before the pandemic struck, questions had been raised as to why nearly 42 percent of federal workers are clustered in office towers in the National Capital Region. In the blink of an eye, thousands of bureaucrats are working from home. Many predict it won’t be long before politicians will be asking why these home offices are in the nation’s capital. Why can’t those jobs be across the country?

The public service’s headquarters is in Ottawa-Gatineau – where it occupies about 3.5 million square metres of office space – because that’s where Parliament, ministers and deputy ministers are. The pandemic shows cabinet, Parliament and MPs can meet virtually, so it’s “inevitable there will be push to spread those jobs across the country,” said Wernick

“I think that 10 years from now the public service will be much smaller, more distributed, less concentrated in Ottawa and flatter in hierarchy. It’s been moving in that direction and this will accelerate it,” he said.

Ryan Androsoff, who teaches digital leadership at the Institute on Governance and is a co-founder of the Canadian Digital Service, calls the crisis an “inflection point” for remote work. Forced to work at home, public servants know they can do it.

He argues agents who work at the government’s 221 call centres could work remotely, as could many policy analysts and other knowledge workers. It could lead to a major reduction in federal real estate holdings across the country.

There are bugs to iron out – more laptops and tablets are needed; employees need access to software for video conferencing, cloud and collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams; and above all, they need more bandwidth. Employees not working on the pandemic or other critical jobs have been directed to stay off the network during peak hours because of limited available bandwidth. Protocols would also need to be developed for accessing confidential documents remotely and the setting of productivity goals.

By headcount, the public service is larger in the regions, but there has long been a divide between headquarters and regions. Senior management is in Ottawa, where policy and decisions are made, leaving operations to the regions. Regional workers have often complained they feel out of the loop and like second-class employees.

Technology and distance working will eliminate that divide and allow the government to recruit a workforce that better represents the country to help resolve the regional alienation dividing the country. Androsoff warned, however, that divide could worsen if the region’s operational workers make the switch to remote working, but Ottawa policy-makers go back to the office as normal.

“Moving to a remote and distributed workforce as the norm for everyone opens up all parts of the country to feel they are a part of the central government rather than isolated in regional outposts,” Androsoff said.

“I am a westerner, from Saskatchewan, and in Ottawa you tend to see far fewer people in policy-making or executive roles from the east and west partly because it requires a move to Ottawa.”

Office accommodation for 300,000 employees is one of the government’s biggest operating expenses. It may be cheaper to set up workers at home, but it will also require a new approach to management for some 15,000 supervisors and 7,000 executives.

“It’s never been a technology limitation. It’s the philosophy about managing the workforce that has to change,” said Michel Vermette, a former CEO of the Association of Professional Executives of the Public Service of Canada.

“It means making people accountable for what they produce, and the public service has not done that very well. It has substituted office presence for production.  Managers need to think differently; hold people accountable for what they do, not for showing up,” he said.

Vermette said the crisis is showing managers they can trust employees are actually working when not in the office because suddenly “they have no choice and people are demonstrating they can be productive at home.”

It could also help change the culture of endless meetings. Some hope the number of large in-person meetings could be curtailed and call for training on how to run them better. Meetings held online or by videoconferencing should treat everyone the same whether they are physically present at headquarters or calling in.

Improving digital access to services

Under lockdown, people are living even more digitally and will emerge expecting better and speedier digital service — especially after they received almost immediate relief benefits in their bank accounts, said Androsoff. He expects demand for digital services will accelerate and the 32 percent of Canadians who still visit federal offices will decline.

The Liberal government has put a lot of stock in modernizing digital services as a way to restore trust in government. The crisis, however, exposes the risks of aging technology that governments have been warned about for a decade. Systems are outdated; some more than 50 years old, costly to maintain and on the brink of failure.

That’s particularly the case at Employment and Social Development Canada, which with the Canada Revenue Agency, jumped huge technological and approval process hurdles to deliver emergency funding.

Debi Daviau, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, argues a “silver lining” is the realization that technology is the backbone of government’s business, not just the back office.

“There will be a big push for improvement in technology because the government is way behind in investments in infrastructure and training,” said Daviau, whose union represents 17,000 federal information technology workers.

“But the downside is whenever there is an economic stimulus, they take it back from the public service, so I worry for the future. There will be a restraint budget. How will the public service be reshaped; what will be cut and what will government decide it can live without? This situation clearly highlights the importance of a public service that can act quickly.”

Government is already racing to figure out how to steer the country into a post-pandemic recovery, which will remain uncertain until a vaccine is found. Many bureaucrats are braced for a cost-cutting budget, whether in 2022 or 2023. They say national and health security will be top spending priorities, and will nudge technology upgrades off the table.

“I share concerns that the inevitable fiscal retrenchment in next couple of years will slam on the brakes,” said Wernick. “We could lose the best parts of the innovation of the public service that has already happened and the appetite for continuing to invest in back office, IT and service improvement.”

Source: How COVID-19 could reshape the federal public service

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No evidence to back WHO director general’s accusations against Taiwan

2020/04/21 Leave a comment

Likely not the end of this story:

The pattern surrounding the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Beijing party-state’s ongoing influence over it continues. Taiwan, a nation that has shown impressive success in combatting the COVID-19 virus despite its exclusion from WHO, is now accused of racism by the organization’s director general.

WHO Director General Tedros A. Ghebreyesus—an Ethiopian microbiologist and the first African to hold the position—asserted that Taiwan’s government not only launched a cyber campaign against him, but is also the instigator of the racism directed at Africans in general.

In a press briefing on April 6, the director general claimed he had been the victim of racially abusive attacks emanating from Taiwan, and that the country’s foreign ministry had actually stepped up its criticism of him.

Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-Wen and the ministry of foreign affairs have denied the charges.

Given the fraught situation between Taiwan and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) generally, including the latter’s manipulation of WHO policies of Taiwan exclusion over the years—combined with the Beijing government’s serious mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, the evidence appears clearly stacked against Tedros’ claims.

President Tsai and her government provided warnings to the WHO as early as last December, which, if not ignored, as they were, might have saved thousands of lives.

For nearly half a century, the People’s Republic of China has effectively blocked Taiwan from joining the WHO. Despite never having exercised authority over the island, the CCP deems Taiwan part of its territory, and forces international organizations—including the United Nations and its agencies like the WHO—to accept its view.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, one of WHO’s top advisers recently evaded and then abruptly cut off Hong Kong journalist Yvonne Tong’s question on whether WHO would reconsider Taiwan’s status in light of the country’s exemplary performance in curbing the spread of COVID-19.

According to the reputable Foreign Policy Magazine, Beijing succeeded from the first outbreak of the coronavirus in misdirecting the World Health Organization (WHO), which receives comparatively modest funding from it but has somehow become obedient to it on many levels.

WHO’s international experts could not gain access to China until Tedros visited President Xi Jinping in Beijing at the end of January. Before then, WHO uncritically repeated information from party-state authorities, ignoring warnings from Taiwanese doctors. Reluctant to declare a “public health emergency of international concern,” WHO denied as late as Jan. 22 that there was any need to do so.

After China’s pandemic had levelled off, notes the Foreign Policy article, Tedros then praised Beijing’s “success.”

In sharp contrast, Taiwan has been treated as an outcast by the WHO, despite its exemplary performance in the current world crisis.

Almost 100 anti-COVID-19 initiatives from Taiwan’s national government included: screening Wuhan flights as early as Dec. 31; banning Wuhan residents on Jan. 23; suspending Taiwanese visits to Hubei province on Jan. 25; and barring all Chinese arrivals on Feb. 6. These and other measures resulted in only 388 confirmed cases and six deaths as of April 12 in a population of almost 24 million.

The WHO not only ignores Taiwan’s medical expertise, but also its status vis-à-vis China.

During the current pandemic, the organization keeps changing how it refers to Taiwan, going from “Taiwan, China,” to “Taipei” to the newer “Taipei and its environs”. It permitted Beijing to report Taiwan’s coronavirus numbers as part of its own total, instead of reporting Taiwan’s numbers alone—a conflation that created headaches for the smaller nation. Some countries imposed travel restrictions  on Taiwan along with China, despite the former’s small infection rate.

“Taiwan’s selfless medical workers and volunteers can be found around the world. The Taiwanese people do not differentiate by skin colour or language; all of us are brothers and sisters,” Tsai said in response to Tedros’ accusations. “We have never let our inability to join international organizations lessen our support for the international community.” She added that the WHO head was welcome to visit Taiwan and see for himself.

The internationally acknowledged success of Taiwan with the scourge of COVID-19 might lead to a diplomatic opening. Its government has already concluded a bilateral agreement with the United States to send masks, which could lead to drugs and vaccines going to America for clinical trials. Other governments seem likely to follow.

Susan Korah is an Ottawa-based journalist and David Kilgour was secretary of state, Asia-Pacific, 2002-2003, and Africa/Latin America, 1997-2002, in the Chrétien government.

Source: OpinionNo evidence to back WHO director general’s accusations against Taiwan

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Delacourt: Canadians aren’t rebelling against Dr. Theresa Tam’s orders, but they might be starting to bristle

2020/04/17 Leave a comment

Couldn’t resist posting given its reference to my Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism with respect to Alberta Premier Kenney’s critique of Dr. Tam:

Sooner or later, someone was going to say it: Who made Dr. Theresa Tam the boss of all Canadians?

The fact that it was Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is not surprising, historically or politically.

But Kenney’s words on Monday were a crack in a wall of remarkable deference to the authority of Canada’s chief medical officer over a month of national lockdown. As we now head into month two, the question is whether Canadians more generally are starting to bristle at the doctor’s orders.

The federal government issued an emphatic “no” on Tuesday.

“Canadians have demonstrated that they have a tremendous level of trust and confidence in our public health officials and in our medical system,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said. “And we are going to continue work with top medical officials like Dr. Theresa Tam to make sure that we’re doing everything we need to do.”

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said that Tam and other provincial public health officers have been conferred with the authority of “rock stars” in this crisis.

But Kenney’s remarks on Monday broke a united front of assent to Tam’s advice — not just as it applies to the future, but to the past as well.

The premier said that Alberta was going to seek out tests and medication to fight the pandemic without waiting for approval from federal Health bureaucrats. Then, in a bit of a drive-by swipe at Tam personally, he also threw doubt on the advice the doctor had already given in the early days of the virus outbreak.

“This is the same Dr. Tam who is telling us that we shouldn’t close our borders to countries with high levels of infection and who in January was repeating talking points out of the (People’s Republic of China)about the no evidence of human-to-human transmission,” Kenney said in an interview on CBC’s Power and Politics program.

There’s an old joke about how you get 50 Canadians out of a pool. You say: “Canadians, get out of the pool.” This pandemic, by and large, has made that joke feel a little too close to home, as a whole nation has put life as we know it on hold to comply with medical orders to contain the COVID-19 virus.

Deferential as we are, we likely wouldn’t have gone to these extraordinary lengths on the basis of political advice alone.

The federal government spent $30-million on a wave of ads with Dr. Tam as the sole spokesperson. (And no, that’s not the voice of Trudeau at the end of the ad, though it does sound an awful lot like him. I asked and the answer was no.)

Day after day, premiers and political leaders line up at podiums to give public briefings, backed by the latest information from the doctors in charge. Whenever a question is asked about what’s going to happen next, the unfailing answer is that governments will be heeding the instructions of the top doctors.

This in itself is evidence that we’re living in unusual times. We don’t always listen to doctors and medical experts, on matters of smoking, obesity, exercise or even climate science, for instance. Statistics aren’t always as persuasive as they are these days, when we’re all scouring charts for flattened curves.

Kenney, as mentioned earlier, has a long history of skepticism about stats and evidence as they’re used in the federal government. One of his own former bureaucrats in the citizenship and multiculturalism department, Andrew Griffith, has written some compelling work about how Kenney forced the public service to rebalance evidence and political considerations while he was minister.

The idea was that politicians are in government to weigh all kinds of public interests against the weight of impersonal numbers and charts, including the intelligence the political types gain from mixing with people outside the corridors of the civil service. So as I said, it’s not that surprising to see Kenney balking again at blind subservience to public servants’ advice, even from Canada’s top doctor.

Is that such a bad thing? Reasonable people might well agree, in fact, that while the medical health of Canadians has to be a priority in this pandemic, the economic health of citizens is owed some due deference too, especially as the financial devastation deepens.

Dr. Tam, for her part, stayed right out of the dispute on Tuesday when asked about Kenney’s remarks, saying only that it’s her job to take many things into consideration, including advice and insights from other countries.

It would be grossly unfair and probably unproductive to make Tam a target, even if Canadians are increasingly bristling at life under doctor’s orders.

But deference to authority in general is a fragile commodity, especially in a nation undergoing an endurance test of indefinite length. Canadians aren’t rebelling, at least not yet, but their deference has time limits.

Source: Susan Delacourt: Canadians aren’t rebelling against Dr. Theresa Tam’s orders, but they might be starting to bristle

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Double standards? PM and Scheer merit sympathy for wish to be with their families

2020/04/15 Leave a comment

At a time when the issues surrounding how governments and society should respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and the corresponding health and economic crisis, one can never underestimate the propensity for silly and shallow commentary.

And the media also pays far too much attention to these superficial issues.

I am sympathetic with political leaders who want to spend time with their families during these difficult times and do not find the actions by the PM and Andrew Scheer to be unreasonable.

As unfortunately to be expected, some Conservative commentators commentators can’t resist the temptation to take aim at PM Trudeau’s going to Harrington Lake to be with his family.

And also, as expected, no sooner than their commentary and tweets are out the corresponding story regarding Andrew Scheer travelling back to Ottawa with his family on a government jet along with two MPs in a confined 9 passenger jet.

Just as previous columns expressing outrage over PM Trudeau’s personal staff were undermined by revelations of Scheer’s excessive compensation for personal expenses (paid by the Conservative party).

As Norman Spector suggested in a tweet, the government could have reduced the risk by sending a separate plane for Scheer and his family despite the additional cost.

The more egregious examples are below, starting the Candice Malcolm:

While ordinary Canadians are facing hefty fines for breaking coronavirus-related public health orders, it appears that the same rules don’t apply to the prime minister and his family.

On Sunday Sophie Grégoire Trudeau posted pictures of herself with Justin Trudeau and their children on Instagram taking part in Easter festivities. According to the advice of public health officials, Trudeau violated the government’s social distancing rules.

“Even though families across the country are having to get a little creative and celebrate a bit differently this year, we’re all in this together,” Grégoire Trudeau wrote on Instagram.

Since March 29, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau and their children have been living in Harrington Lake, Que. while Justin Trudeau has remained in Ottawa.

As Justin Trudeau and his wife and children now live in separate households, the family should be practicing social distancing.

Social distancing means that individuals should avoid contact with those that live outside their household, including family members.

On Friday Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam told Canadians celebrating Easter and Passover to stay home this year.

“We need to not let down our guard. The safest plan for your holidays is a staycation for the nation,” she said.

Dr Howard Njoo, Canada’s deputy chief public health officer, added that celebrations should be limited to members of your household.

On April 1 the government of Quebec introduced strict travel restrictions across the province, including police checkpoints to prevent unnecessary travel in and out of Quebec.

Since the restrictions began, police have prevented 2,300vehicles from crossing the Ottawa-Gatineau border.

How Justin Trudeau’s trip to the family retreat in Harrington Lake would be considered necessary travel is not clear.

On Friday a family of four in Oakville was fined $880 for rollerblading in a parking lot of a community centre. The family says there was no indication anywhere that they were not allowed to be in the area.

In recent weeks hundreds of Canadians have also been fined for breaking public health orders, most of them for not following social distancing rules.

Source: Double standard: Trudeau violates social distancing rules

And the similar if not plagiarized one by Brian Lilley:

Justin Trudeau showed once again on Easter weekend that he doesn’t play by the same rules as everyone else, not even the rules he tell us to follow.

It was just last Friday that the PM was telling the whole country during his daily address that you couldn’t go see family for Easter.

“This weekend is going to be very different. You’ll have to stay home. You’ll have to Skype that big family dinner and the Easter egg hunt,” Trudeau said, standing outside of Rideau Cottage on the grounds of Rideau Hall in Ottawa.

That statement was followed up by this one.

“During the long weekend, we will all have to stay home. We cannot have gatherings for dinner and we’ll have to be creative to organize an Easter egg hunt inside the house,” Trudeau said.

So what did he do this weekend?

He got in his motorcade, with his full entourage, on Saturday afternoon and drove to the PM’s summer residence at Harrington Lake. From one cottage to the other, it is about 27 kilometers, it crosses a provincial boundary and goes through at least three municipalities.

In other words, Trudeau did exactly the opposite of what he, his own medical experts and the premiers of Ontario and Quebec have been saying. Ontario’s Doug Ford and Quebec’s Francois Legault have told people not to go to the cottage and to stay in our primary residence.

This is all part of flattening the curve we are told and making sure we don’t spread the virus. Quebec has even imposed travel restrictions within the province and for more than a week now, people trying to cross from Ottawa into Gatineau have been turned back unless they are essential workers.

No visiting the cottage, no shopping, no visiting family, no going on a drive through Gatineau Park. If you don’t live there, you are turned back.

Trudeau lives by different rules, though.

In normal times I would get this. I don’t begrudge him the fact that he travels with a big entourage; I get that being PM carries risks most of us can’t dream of. That said, these are not normal times.

Most of us would have loved to have visited family this weekend but we didn’t. We stayed home.

My parents are a short drive away and yet I have not seen them since they got back from Florida more than three weeks ago and I won’t see them soon.

Health officials warn against visiting anyone that you don’t already live with.

We are told time and again, including by Trudeau, that these are the sacrifices we have to make to fight COVID-19. On Saturday — just before he hopped in the motorcade and broke all the rules — Trudeau invoked the sacrifice of the men at Vimy Ridge to encourage us all to follow the rules.

Then he went to the cottage to see his wife and kids who have been living there for weeks and guess what, they had a big Easter egg hunt outside and posted it on social media.

At times like this, we need leaders who will lead by example; this weekend, Trudeau was not that leader.

He was showing he doesn’t follow the rules he sets for the little people and by posting the photos online, he and his family were openly mocking us.

Source: LILLEY: Trudeau’s cottage visit mocks us and the rules he sets

The one column by Ryan Tumulty who at least gives both equal treatment:

Conservative leader Andrew Scheer brought his wife, Jill, and five children to Ottawa aboard a small government jet, along with two other MPs, during a time when health authorities are encouraging people to keep socially distant.

The government has dispatched planes to pick up MPs in western Canada to allow them to attend the House of Commons in person for emergency votes that have taken place since the Commons stopped sitting in mid-March.

As the CBC first reported, the flight aboard the nine-seat Challenger jet picked up Green Party parliamentary leader Elizabeth May and Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough in British Columbia, before collecting Scheer in Regina along with his wife and children.

Public health officials across Canada have encouraged everyone to stay home due to the crisis and to avoid all non-essential travel and keep a two-metre distance from others.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also travelled over the weekend, heading to Harrington Lake, which is about 25 kilometres from his home, Rideau Cottage, in Ottawa.

Trudeau’s wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, posted a photo online of the prime minister and his three children on Sunday at the cottage.

Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, has discouraged people from going to their cottage properties.

“Urban dwellers should avoid heading to rural properties, as these places have less capacity to manage COVID-19,” she said in early April.

Meanwhile, May confirmed every seat on the Challenger plane was full once Scheer’s family boarded, but she said everyone did their best to limit potential spread.

“I wore my mask. I kept the best distance I could keep under the circumstances,” she said.

May said she was extraordinarily grateful to be offered a seat on the flight, because otherwise, even after driving to Vancouver, she would have had to board multiple commercial flights.

“It was still going to be three airports going through Vancouver, going through Toronto to get to Ottawa.“

She said she was offered the flight by the government and initially told it would be her, Qualtrough and Scheer on board. May said afterwards she was given the chance to object when Scheer asked to bring his family, but she understood where they were coming from.

May said the deciding factor was knowing that if Mrs. Scheer and the children were not allowed onboard they would have had to make their way to Ottawa by commercial flights.

“It is a personal family decision. I am not going to put myself in their shoes,” she said.

Scheer’s spokesperson Denise Siele said the trip made more sense than other possible options.

“This one way trip resulted in less travel than Mr. Scheer flying back and forth every time the House sits, or flying the entire family on commercial flights through multiple airports,” she said in an email.

She said the Scheer family would now be remaining in Ottawa.

“After spending several weeks in Regina over the March break, Mr. Scheer and his family will be based out of Ottawa for the rest of the spring session.”

Simon Ross, a spokesperson for the Government House Leader, said the government has sent several flights to bring MPs and senators to Ottawa for emergency sittings.

“During these exceptional circumstances brought on by pandemic, when possible the Government has sought to accommodate government aircraft requests from MPs and Senators.”

May said she returned home on the government plane Saturday, after the house rose, with only her and Qualtrough on board.

Source: Government’s COVID-19 rules don’t seem to apply to Andrew Scheer and Justin Trudeau

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You don’t stop a virus by bleeding democracy

2020/04/15 Leave a comment

Why is it that governments, no matter their political stripe, cannot resist the temptation to over-reach and reduce oversight, whether with respect to bloated omnibus budget bills or during the current COVID-19 pandemic?

And while the federal Conservatives, supported by the NDP, correctly forced the Liberals to back down given a minority government, in Alberta, there is no such check on the UCP government as this Globe editorial details.

Even more shameful than the attempted federal Liberal element given the UCP’s majority and its disregard for parliament (ironic, given that Premier Kenney was an effective parliamentarian at the federal level).

Hopefully, the same conservative-leaning pundits that rightly condemned the Liberal attempted power grab will also call out the Alberta UCP power grab (the first one to do so, John Carpay: Alberta’s Bill 10 is an affront to the rule of law):

Three weeks ago, the Trudeau government tried to use the cover of the coronavirus crisis to give itself unchecked powers once enjoyed by 17th-century European monarchs.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had recalled the House of Commons on March 23 to debate and pass emergency measures to shore up the economy and help Canadians who were losing their jobs.

The opposition were willing to back the minority government’s economic measures, but once they saw the draft bill, they realized the Liberals had something more in mind.

Along with tens of billions of dollars in aid for Canadians in need, the bailout legislation also included clauses that would have given the government the power to raise or lower taxes, and to spend money, without going through Parliament. These extraordinary powers were to last until Dec. 31, 2021.

The opposition, along with many in the media, this page included, were having none of it. By the end of the day on March 23, the government relented. It removed the offending clauses, the opposition offered its backing and, the next day, the bill became law.

Team Trudeau has not explained its attempted end run around democracy, probably because it can’t. There is never any reason to usurp Parliament’s critical role as overseer of government and keeper of the public purse. Every Canadian government, provincial or federal, should get that.

And yet, barely a week later, it happened again.

In Alberta, the United Conservative Party of Premier Jason Kenney used its overwhelming majority to push through a bill on April 2 that gives cabinet ministers unilateral power to write and enact new laws in public health emergencies, with zero oversight by the provincial legislature.

Under Bill 10, the only requirement for enacting a new law is that the relevant minister “is satisfied that doing so is in the public interest.” The only limit on that power is that a new offence cannot be applied retroactively.

It is utterly wrong for democratic governments to seek unilateral powers under the cover of an emergency. It is also unnecessary. There is no justification for it – especially not the one that says governments need to move quickly in a crisis.

Alberta passed Bill 10 in less than 48 hours; the Trudeau government, having secured the support of the opposition, passed its original bailout measures in the same short period. Last weekend, it took less than a day for Parliament to adopt a wage subsidy package. The government shared the legislation with the opposition in advance and made changes to ensure it would pass.

Giving legislators the chance to study, debate and vote on bills doesn’t result in unacceptable delays – if anything, as shown time and again, it improves legislation. More importantly, the transparency and accountability that comes from having to pass a bill through Parliament is the foundation of our system of government.

The Liberals and the opposition parties are now arguing about how often the House of Commons should sit during the remainder of the crisis, and whether sessions should be held in person with a skeleton crew of members, or with all MPs, via teleconferencing.

However it does so, Parliament must sit. Committees, too. And Question Period must happen, so that the government remains answerable to the House and to Canadians. That holds in Ottawa and in each of the provinces. It goes for both minority and majority governments.

Under no circumstances should any government see this emergency as an excuse to sideline the elected representatives of the people.

Thanks to their daily crisis briefings, government leaders are dominating the news coverage. Opposition voices have been sidelined, but they must be given their due in order for our democracy to function properly. That happens best in Parliament.

This crisis is demanding a lot of Canadians. They are self-isolating at home with their families. Many have lost their jobs, or are watching their businesses teeter on the precipice.

They will be able to decide for themselves whether federal and provincial opposition parties have helped the situation, or simply been a partisan nuisance. But Canadians must not come out the other end of this only to discover that their institutions and rights have been compromised by governments that grabbed for powers they were not entitled to.

Source:    You don’t stop a virus by bleeding democracy Editorial <img src=”https://www.theglobeandmail.com/resizer/p5aED50QGxv9DJSWx6332Wy7vT0=/163×0:4746×3055/600×0/filters:quality(80)/arc-anglerfish-tgam-prod-tgam.s3.amazonaws.com/public/5D7WOGR7DNNH3AJ33H42OZMKTU.jpg” alt=””>     

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Canadian doctor once posted to Beijing ignored by Ottawa after offering help with COVID-19 response

2020/04/14 Leave a comment

Does seem to be an oversight. The more serious one is why was he not replaced (likely due to budget pressures and the high cost, and changing priorities):

For seven years, Felix Li served on the distant front lines of Canadian public health, in China. As a doctor posted to Beijing, he fostered ties with health authorities that let him peer beneath the official rhetoric of a country that has been the source of multiple viral epidemics in recent decades.

When Dr. Li returned to Canada in 2015 and retired from the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) after 23 years, he was not replaced.

But he retained his contacts inside the Chinese public health system and was keen to help when another outbreak began to emerge.

So, a few days after the Jan. 23 lockdown of Wuhan, he sent an e-mail to the PHAC, including Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam, offering his expertise.

“I offered to go back to Ottawa to work with them on this. I needed to help, to save lives,” Dr. Li said in an interview.

In the e-mail, he described his knowledge of the Chinese system and the contacts he maintains there.

“I got an e-mail back saying, ‘We’ll talk about it and let you know.’ But I never had any response after that.”

Instead, the PHAC has relied heavily on the World Health Organization for information and guidance in its response to the rapid spread of the deadly new virus.

But critics have questioned the relationship between the WHO and China, whose response the WHO has praised effusively. The health organization has raised few public concerns about the reliability of information provided by Beijing, despite evidence suggesting Chinese authorities have significantly underreported the death toll from the outbreak.

Dr. Li said that, during his time in China, there was a difference in “the quality of the information” he was able to obtain by communicating directly with people at China’s Ministry of Health and the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. During the 2013 H7N9 avian influenza outbreak, for example, he received updates directly from Chinese officials.

Were he working now, he’d “probably get a lot more timely and accurate information on things,” he said.

There is good reason to seek more sources of information, public health experts say.

“In any acute emergency, there is always benefit of ‘on the ground’ expertise and contacts in getting access to data and understanding the nuances of actual context. There is also always value in having multiple sources of data, information or intelligence, and it would be wise to have as many sources as possible,” said James Orbinski, director of York University’s Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research.

“Relying on one source of information for critical decision making leaves you open to all of its biases and limitations, and every source – even ‘official’ ones, like the WHO, the government of China, the CIA, the government of the United States, the government of Canada – has biases and limitations.”

The PHAC says it has full confidence in its methods – and in the WHO. “With the situation related to COVID-19 continuing to evolve rapidly around the world, Canada will continue to work closely with its international partners, including the WHO and China, as well as with provincial and territorial counterparts to reduce risks to Canadians and the global community,” spokesperson Anna Maddison said in an e-mailed statement.

The agency can rely on Canada’s foreign service “to share and gather information related to health and public health matters,” Ms. Maddison said.

Canada’s embassies and consulates in China, however, have been working with low staffing levels after non-essential staff – including provincial representatives – were sent home.

Unlike the U.S., Canada does not have a wide-reaching global public health service, which makes it reliant upon the WHO. That’s not a bad thing, said Srinivas Murthy, an infectious disease specialist at the University of British Columbia who has worked with the WHO.

“The WHO is a very reputable, very strong organization which has that capacity,” Dr. Murthy said. “I don’t think Canada specifically needs a foreign public health agency.”

But there are also risks in relying on an agency that itself relies on information from China, a country where statistics are often bent to political imperatives. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has itself been criticized for cutting its staff in China by two-thirds before the COVID-19 outbreak.

In Canada, meanwhile, it appears health leaders are not receiving sufficient advice on the potential weaknesses of Chinese data being transmitted by the WHO, said Charles Burton, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute who has twice worked out of the Canadian embassy in Beijing.

The result is that China’s “politically motivated misinformation tragically leads to unnecessary Canadian deaths,” he said.

Dr. Li began his public health work in Beijing in 2008 with the belief that “Canada should not be responding to epidemics or pandemics when they reach the shores of Canada. We should be proactively working with China.”

He declined to offer his views on how China and Canada have responded to COVID-19, for fear of damaging his relationships with public health officials he still hopes to work alongside.

“As a medical doctor and a public health doctor, our task is to save lives. If I were called upon, I’d jump on the next plane to Ottawa,” he said.

Source: Canadian doctor once posted to Beijing ignored by Ottawa after offering help with COVID-19 response

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USA: Our Government Runs on a 60-Year-Old Coding Language, and Now It’s Falling Apart

2020/04/14 Leave a comment

Similar in Canada I believe, making it all that more impressive how well public servants were able to ramp up so quickly EI claim processing and implement CERB (WatchJohn Ivison: Amid staggering unemployment rate, public servants handling EI claims are unsung heroes).

Similar issues arose regarding lack of COBOL programmers during Y2K:

Over the weekend, New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, made an unusual public plea during his daily coronavirus briefing: The state was seeking volunteer programmers who know COBOL, a 60-year old programming language that the state’s unemployment benefits system is built on. Like every state across the nation, New Jersey was being flooded with unemployment claims in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. And New Jersey’s data processing systems were unprepared.

“We literally have a system that is 40-plus years old,” Murphy said.

To COBOL programmers, it was a familiar ask. In times of bureaucratic crisis over the last 50 years, Americans have been faced time and time again with the dusty, dated systems that undergird much of our government, and economy. In response to Y2K, when it was unclear whether the date of the new millennium might cause cascading errors across the entire world’s computing systems, legions of programmers fluent in largely forgotten languages like COBOL were specifically hired to fix government and enterprise code. As a result, Y2K was largely a nonissue.

Over 20 years later, much of the state, federal, and banking systems still run on these very same programming languages.

New Jersey isn’t the only state that depends on COBOL. Connecticut’s computer systems for processing unemployment also runs on it, the state’s governor said last week, which is causing weeks-long processing delays. Connecticut and four other states are creating a joint effort to recruit retired COBOL programmers who can update the state software.

The scarcity of COBOL programmers has led to increased interest in startups like COBOL Cowboys, made up of older, experienced programmers who have the know-how to operate these systems.

COBOL debuted in 1960 and was largely used on IBM mainframes for business tasks like accounting. IBM continues to sell mainframes compatible with COBOL.

The Government Accountability Office has repeatedly warned about the use of legacy programming languages for critical systems. In 2019, the GAO issued a report summarizing 10 federal computing systems that were in desperate need of an overhaul. For instance, the Department of Education’s system for processing federal student aid applications was implemented in 1973. It takes 18 contractors to maintain the system, and since it’s written in COBOL, it requires specific hardware and is difficult to integrate with newer software languages.

GAO considers COBOL a legacy language, which means agencies have trouble finding staff that knows how to write the code at all. And when they can, the specialist contractors charge a premium.

It also means that when a system breaks, there might not be somebody there to fix it. And that’s where New Jersey finds itself now, with a sagging system and lack of qualified engineers.

Despite its age, and the fact that so many programmers have moved onto C and Java, COBOL is still a widely used programming language. It’s tried and true, which is partly why it was so widely adopted by banks and governments in the second half of the 20th century.

Today, nearly half the world’s banking systems run on COBOL, according to Reuters, and more than 80% of card-based transactions use the code.

“I show COBOL programs written in 1960 that you can still compile and run today,” says J. Ray Scott, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and one of the few professors who still teaches COBOL.

“I would hate to be a bank and have Python, and Python 3 came out and broke everything, and then we have to recompile all our code,” he said.

Scott attributes the lack of COBOL programmers to a number of issues, from the absence of an open-source version of the software in the ’80s and ’90s to the simple appeal of newer databases that natively connect to the internet.

“There was a period of 20 years where people were sure COBOL was dead, so there was nobody teaching it, nobody learning it,” he said. “COBOL started before there were disc drives, let alone the internet.”

A sliver of hope, Scott says, is that COBOL isn’t a particularly complex language to learn. When he was starting his career programming for steel mills in Pittsburgh, he says companies would perform aptitude tests for workers on the floors of the mills. If they passed, they were sent to a two-week COBOL class at IBM and then put onto the job in the IT department.

Bill Hinshaw, who runs COBOL Cowboys, says that the 60-year old programming language still has some life in it, especially in industries where it’s inexorably linked to critical functions. In his experience, governments are simply working with older versions of software and hardware, compared to banks and other industries.

“We’re dealing with more and more people who want to modernize COBOL,” Hinshaw says. “COBOL is not going away.”

Still, governments relying on a system too arcane for most working engineers can be perceived as a structural failure. Murphy’s plea for COBOL engineers is also a sign that local, state, and federal governments have overwhelmingly failed to update their technologies to meet the needs of citizens.

“There will be lots of postmortems,” after the coronavirus passes, Murphy said in his address to New Jersey. One of them on our list will be, ‘How the heck did we get here where we literally needed COBOL programmers?’”

Source:  Our Government Runs on a 60-Year-Old Coding Language, and Now It’s Falling Apart

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Canadians would not have backed strict pandemic measures in mid-January, says official

2020/04/11 Leave a comment

While legitimate of course to criticize the government’s response (and lack of follow-up to the SARS report Ottawa had a playbook for a coronavirus-like pandemic 14 years ago. What went wrong?), tend to agree that many of the same people criticizing the government for being too slow would have criticized the government had they acted much earlier:

Closing the border and telling the public to self-isolate at home in the early days of Canada’s COVID-19 outbreak would have done more harm than good, according to a national public health organization.

Ian Culbert, executive director of the Canadian Public Health Association (CPHA), told a virtual committee of MPs today that while critics have said the federal government should have acted sooner, there would have been “very little” public support for strict measures in the middle of January, which could have undermined health officials’ efforts when the situation became more dire.

“Low public support would have led to low-level adherence and a diminished support for any future interventions,” he said. “Slowly, you have to change people’s thinking … that takes time. It takes evidence. You have to prove to people that it’s serious.”

The House of Commons health committee is studying Canada’s response to the COVID-19 virus to ensure the federal government learns lessons that can be applied to the next pandemic. The Liberal government has faced criticism for waiting until the eve of Ontario’s March break to tell people not to travel. The Conservatives have accused the Trudeau government of failing to restrict public gatherings soon enough and waiting too long to impose tougher measures at the border.After critics accused it of lax screening at airports for returning travellers, Quebec Premier François Legault sent his own public health officials and police to airports to warn travellers to self-isolate for two weeks. This week, B.C. Premier John Horgan took it a step further and imposed a new legal requirement forcing travellers to present formal self-isolation plans to authorities at airports and border crossings.Culbert said while public health officials’ incremental approach has been attacked, he believes it was backed up by evidence.

Culbert said it’s hard to change human behaviour — especially in Canada’s case, given that the pandemic started halfway around the world in China. Canadians felt a sense of “insulation,” he said. That attitude carried on even when Canada reported its first cases in British Columbia and Ontario, he added.

“There’s a sense of them and us,” he said. “Slowly, you have to change people’s thinking. There’s no them and us. It’s a ‘we’ situation.”

He turned to an example from the 20th century: when Canadians with tuberculosis were forced to leave their families and isolate in sanatoriums, he said, many avoided public health authorities as a result, which spread the disease further.

“This shows coercive actions can only be used as a last resort,” he said.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says it will take months of Canadians’ “continued, determined effort” to follow pandemic measures such as physical distancing to overcome COVID-19. 1:55

There’s been a “massive cultural change” over the last century in the public’s attitudes toward science and health authorities, Culbert added. But he pointed to the anti-vaccination movement as a current example that shows public health officials can’t just tell people what’s good for them and expect them to listen.

“Just telling people the right thing to do doesn’t work anymore,” he said. “We have to convince people. It takes time, unfortunately … but it’s actually what works.”

‘We’re just trying to strengthen the message’: Tam

Conservative MP Tamara Jansen questioned the government’s incremental approach to the restrictions.

Jansen said that in January, the Langley Chinese Cultural Arts Association cancelled a large event proactively before Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam banned large gatherings.

She also said that, early in the outbreak, members of the Chinese community in B.C.’s Lower Mainland were picking up people at the airport returning from China to ensure they didn’t take cabs. They were also buying them groceries so they didn’t go to the grocery store, she said.”They were begging me to get the government to be more proactive,” said Jansen.”This was all done on a completely voluntary basis. Is it possible it was a misjudgment of [the] willingness of Canadians to self-isolate that this didn’t go quicker?”

Culbert said this particular community likely felt directly affected because of their ties to the epicentre of the outbreak in Wuhan, China.

“You’re talking about a highly sensitized community,” he said. “They had a direct connection [to] what was happening in China and were very much aware. Many Canadians were not that connected and [were] thinking of it as a problem on the other side of the country.”

Dr. Tam, meanwhile, was asked at a press conference today if she’s recommending the government enact even stricter measures.Tam said she’s working with her provincial and territorial counterparts to monitor the trajectory of the pandemic and figure out how effective the current measures are. She said innovative studies are underway to track how well Canadians are following those measures, which could point to places where they can be bolstered.

“We’re just trying to strengthen the message to Canadians that really you should avoid all non-essential travel and stay at home as much as possible during this critical period,” she said.

Source: Canadians would not have backed strict pandemic measures in mid-January, says official

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No time to fly blind: To beat COVID 19, Canada needs better data

2020/04/09 Leave a comment

As we always do! Bit surprised no discussion of what role the Canadian Institute of Health Information (CIHI) could play:

Accurate information is critical to fight a health emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic. Robust data identifies the scale of the problem. It enables the prioritization of human, financial and material resources for an effective and efficient response. It allows for public scrutiny, advocacy and accountability. It builds trust. It provides authorities with tools to counter misinformation. It will enable us to slowly and safely return to economic and social activity.

In short, good data can mean the difference between life and death – or in the case of a pandemic, tens of thousands of deaths. Yet in the face of the greatest international health crisis in a generation, Canada is falling short.

Prime Minister Trudeau promised better data. To deliver on this promise, the Public Health Agency must mandate standardized information reporting for provincial and district public health authorities. These standardized templates would outline the data and information to be reported, how it should be collected and how it should be shared. Moreover, the Agency should urgently provide financial and technical resources to improve information management at all levels of the public health response.

At first glance COVID-19 data appears to be plentiful – case numbers and graphs are splashed across news reports and public health websites. Public health agencies produce epidemiological reports with colourful graphs and charts. Officials quote modelling estimates of projected case numbers and fatalities.

But in reality the value  of this information is limited. Efforts to fill in information gaps with modelling is a short-term and imperfect substitute for real-time data.  The data that does exist is of questionable validity given low testing numbers within the population and delays in receiving test results. Moreover, the data is not gathered, compiled or presented in a consistent manner by health authorities across the country. Different case definitions make comparison within and across provinces difficult. Sex and age disaggregated figures are not always provided. Some areas report hospitalization and intensive care unit numbers, some do not. Warnings of medical equipment and personal protective equipment (PPE) shortages are widespread, yet inventories of PPE stockpiles are frequently not given.

Moreover, public health officials report cases but do not discuss population context. They do not present important statistics about communities including age, sex and socio-economic data and specific vulnerabilities. Authorities rarely provide information on the number of health workers employed in the response, hospital beds available or PPE stockpiles. Officials cite testing numbers with little concrete data on laboratory capacity or efforts to expand it.

It is confusing. Overwhelming. And unhelpful.

Without accurate data and information, authorities cannot identify and manage human, financial and material resources to engage in the fight against COVID-19.  Nor can they monitor the effectiveness of interventions and stop its spread.

We can do better. During humanitarian crises, which often occur in data-scarce contexts, central coordinating bodies prioritize the collection and transparent dissemination of information. They develop standardized “Situation Reports” at multiple levels – the community, the region and the country – to identify need, prioritize interventions and target scarce human, material and financial resources. In the health sector, reports include population size disaggregated by sex, age and vulnerability; the number of health facilities in operation; key causes and rates of illness and mortality; medical procedures and treatment courses. These reports are published openly and disseminated widely. Information is critical for an effective and efficient response in complex and rapidly changing environments. It allows resources to be targeted to save lives.

COVID-19 warrants something similar. We need to understand the progress of the disease and our response – in real time. Proper information management will not only improve the effectiveness of our interventions, but it will also enable the safe resumption of economic and social activity.

A standardized reporting template would include case numbers and hospitalizations (sex and age disaggregated).  But counting the numbers of outbreak cases is only one piece of the information puzzle. Reports should include community baseline data. Important information includes population demographics (age, sex and particular vulnerabilities), neighbourhoods with higher risks, and the number of vulnerable institutions (retirement and nursing homes, corrections facilities). Authorities would identify financial, human and material resources available and required. Reports should document laboratories with COVID-19 testing capacity and provide inventories of PPE.

Better data would allow us to identify critical intervention points to stop the spread of COVID-19 and to slowly get our lives and economy back on track. The lack of prioritization on testing is both a symptom and a consequence of Canada’s failure to prioritize information management. Given testing capacity, public health officials discourage tests for those with mild symptoms. This undermines the validity of most of the numbers used by public officials to track the COVID-19 outbreak. Without the total ‘real’ numbers of individuals infected, we lack an accurate denominator, which undermines the accurate calculation of hospitalization or case fatality rates. Lag times in test results also make accurate contact tracing very difficult.

More critically, without expanded testing, we lack the ability to quickly test health workers and those employed in other essential services (such as retirement homes) to protect them, their co-workers, patients or residents and the public. Nor do we have the ability to test people to gradually and safely scale up economic and social activity. Instead we are told to wait for testing innovations while COVID rates numbers rise. Yet many private labs as well as lab facilities in university and colleges remain unutilized over three weeks into Canada’s full scale COVID-19 response. With better information would come increased accountability for mobilizing such capacity.

COVID-19 has sparked one innovation in information production – the use of outbreak models to guide public health responses to COVID-19, often funded by public health authorities. The federal government recently provided $192 million to BlueDot – a Toronto based digital health firm, not a university research department – to support its modelling activities. After calls to release modelling estimates, some provincial governments have provided projections of case and mortality numbers.

But transparency warrants more. Modelling in general is extremely challenging and COVID-19 modelling is particularly complex. Population demographic characteristics appear to determine the speed of COVID-19 transmission as well as severe illness, hospitalization and fatality rates. While the professionalization of the modellers is not in question, research driving policy decisions should be published openly and subject to scrutiny. The lack of clarity contrasts unfavourably to models published in scientific journals, or those published online by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, University of London. If governments release model estimates, they should release the assumptions and data that inform these estimates.

Moreover, modelling is an imperfect and flawed substitute for real data and concrete information about the response. Policy makers urgently need to pay attention to the generation and management of accurate and valid data, mandate standardized reporting from all public health authorities and provide public funds to make it happen.

We are in unprecedented public policy territory. Yet we lack the information needed to effectively navigate the COVID-19 pandemic and get our economy and our lives back on track. Prime Minister Trudeau’s commitment to better data and improved information management provides Canada’s Public Health Agency with the opportunity to exercise leadership. It is time to up our game.

Source: No time to fly blind: To beat COVID 19, Canada needs better data

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Ai Weiwei: The virus in the body politic: We have lost our ability to cherish each other

2020/04/06 Leave a comment

Worth reading and reflecting upon:

I was living in Beijing in 2003 when SARS struck, and I can remember how that felt. It descended as an entirely new thing – a new concept, an unwelcome intruder, an ominous threat. It galvanized a new mindset in society and led the government to impose unprecedented defences. Some of those defences have been used again to combat the coronavirus, but to citizens, the two campaigns have felt different. SARS felt like a battle; coronavirus feels like a war.

With SARS, the government’s first response was to seal off all reports and to deny that a problem existed. The truth only emerged when an elderly military doctor, who had seen the government’s Minister of Public Health lie broadly to the Chinese people on television, wrote a letter to Chinese media that was leaked to the foreign press.

The government then drew on techniques used in the military and in prisons to suppress the outbreak. Ordinary folk, lacking better medical advice, resorted to herbal medicines, antibiotics, or hormones, which were either useless or harmful, and when they were harmful, they added to the death toll.

Sadly, the same thing has happened again. When the coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan last November, doctors who noticed it began passing along the news in text messages – only to be summoned by police, reprimanded and ordered to remain silent.

It took until Jan. 11 for Wuhan’s health commission to report the city’s first known death from this new kind of coronavirus, along with dozens of cases. At the same time, the commission insisted that the virus could not spread from person to person, which we now know to be false. Its purported origin was from a live animal market, but not long after that announcement, alternative theories began to circulate, given oxygen by a lack of transparency on the part of a Chinese government that has a poor record around trust. And just this Wednesday, a U.S. intelligence report declared that Beijing has been intentionally under-reporting the total numbers of cases and deaths there.

With the virus racing and information suppressed, the government eventually decided to abruptly seal off Wuhan and place its more than 11 million citizens under mandatory quarantine. There were strict rules and police enforced them. People could not enter or exit quarantine zones at will, and some people were not allowed to leave home. Some doors were even welded shut. Between mid-January and mid-March, quarantine and detention tactics were deployed across China. The country was in shock.

By late March, the number of new cases in China had slowed. But in the meantime, the virus had spread to more than a hundred other countries, where the total numbers of confirmed cases and deaths have now exceeded China’s. And where once there was only criticism for China’s unique station and particular response, other countries – democratic or otherwise – are now panicking through their own preparations and plans.

What the world needs now – in China, and in the world at large – is sober reflection on what it means to cherish life.

What, exactly, is a virus? About one-thousandth the size of a bacterium, a virus cannot survive or reproduce on its own. To live, it must enter, attach to and parasitize a living cell. Viruses have been doing this for tens of thousands of years – entering living bodies and dying when the host body either kills them with its immune system, or when the body dies itself. This happens because the immune system’s battle with viruses also kills normal cells, and if too much of that happens, the host body can perish, taking the virus with it. In this fight to the death, both sides can lose.

It’s a useful metaphor when considering how various countries have responded to their given outbreaks. The Chinese government is authoritarian, but that gives it huge advantages in combating the virus; it can set aside considerations of human rights and individual freedom, to say nothing of “cherishing life.” Virus control in democratic countries such as Italy, Britain and the United States, where the freedom of individuals is respected, is clearly more difficult and complex.

But there, too, cherishing life can feel impossible. The U.S. does not have a public medical system or universal guarantees of health. Its hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are private, and they operate on the principle of capitalism in the service of individual patients. And the full terror of such a health-care system has been put on display with this latest outbreak, exposing the fantasy of “the land of equal opportunity” for what it really is: a place where those with means are taken care of, while the rest are left to fend for themselves.

The only conclusion a reasonable person can derive from the semi-coherent ramblings of U.S. President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, when they answer questions about the coronavirus, is that neither man is focused on cherishing life, but only on how well bureaucratic capitalism is operating. One’s only source of cheer in observing the tiny coronavirus is to note its spirit of egalitarianism: You are a religious leader? A famous actor or high official? A politician who either does or does not think I am causing a crisis? Fine – I treat you all the same.

What are we learning from the disaster? Can we learn something about, as former Chinese Communist Party general secretary Hu Jintao once declared, a “community of shared destiny”? If such a phrase were to come from today’s Chinese leaders, who pursue crony capitalism while speaking of Marxism, it could seem like self-satire. In Karl Marx’s original vision, communism is the model of humanity’s ultimate ideals: a community of equals that accords with the basic characteristics of human life. China’s constitution and the charter of the Chinese Communist Party, however, both cite communism as the glorious endpoint of political “struggle.” Also by contrast, the Western capitalist world prioritizes commercial competition while taking democracy and human rights as its ethical base (even though, it must be said, that base has been regularly defiled and now is only a weak answer to the challenges of authoritarianism). With such divergent expressions of ideals in the world, how can we talk about a “community of shared destiny”?

The actual fate of the world today is a freakish amalgam of different systems. For Western capitalism to continue expanding, it has had no choice but to partner with exploitative, authoritarian states such as China, to profit in ways that the West cannot at home. By doing so, despite the seemingly deep ideological differences, Western capitalism has allowed Chinese communism into its structure, virus-like, and the two now share a fate. Indeed, just as how former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s guideline to “let some of the people get rich first” became the only fate that mattered to many Chinese people from the 1990s on, this viral hybrid system that resulted has continued to grow. It now threatens civilization’s immune system – just wait and see.

The insertion of an external element into an organism can demonstrate life’s uniformity, but also its fragility. The same key fits into all locks, be they black or white, Christian or Muslim, or a fearless atheist. Can humanity respond? Whether or not wisdom, science, medical expertise and the protection of various gods will be enough to see fragile humanity through this moment – we do not clearly know. At a minimum, a question will remain: If a similar disaster comes in five years, or two, or less, what will happen? Will humanity’s spiritual values and material wealth be able to hold up?

In the interim, we should be thinking about the true value of our fragile little bundle of life, and how it can live in harmony with nature at large. If we can do this, then no sort of political opinion, religion, war, or any other of the various concerns of mankind should be able to block our quest for survival. This is a question of philosophy that goes well beyond medical science or the arguments of politicians. A philosophy is realized only in the details of the joys and pains of human experience.

After death, a corpse cools and interment may follow, regardless of what has died – virus, human being, all of humanity, or all of life. Let’s hope that humanity begins understanding that there are no differences in the end.

When information is hard to access and people are prevented from drawing informed conclusions, hatred, bias, prejudice and violence come rolling out. A shared understanding of life is nearly impossible. The most fundamental humanist understanding is that life and death co-exist, and the attitudes necessary to reach such an understanding are tolerance, empathy, recognition of suffering and willingness to help others. This is so because other people are a part of oneself; protection of oneself calls for protection of human society. To see this point is to identify with the value of common existence, which is the reliable basis for all of our pleasures and happiness. Otherwise we live with nothing but empty illusions that a whiff of breeze can blow away.

To stand in awe of life itself is the best way to see the connections between an individual body and the rest of life. We despise war, we despise the barriers that separate people and we despise the political schemes that divide people into irreconcilable groups. The compensation that the coronavirus affords us is that we can view the world with a bit more wisdom.

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