Please note that, while the above table is automatically updated daily, the original text below is unchanged from October 12, 2021.
While health is constitutionally a shared jurisdiction, public health measures have traditionally been seen as provincial matters. Thus the course of subsequent waves has been almost entirely determined by provincial decisions. With majority governments the norm across Canada, those were for the most part taken by each individual Premier and his (there being no women among them) inner circle of unelected advisors) based on their personal predilections and political agendas. Needless to say, real public health expertise was notably absent in those circles. The result was unconscionably huge, orders-of-magnitude differences in the death rates experienced by Canadians depending on their provinces of residence, which is not supposed to happen in this country.
To fairly compare those Premiers’ respective performances, this chart focuses on deaths occurring in the second and subsequent waves, by which point much more was known and each province went its own way in terms of what measures to adopt and when. The key metric for comparison is their respective COVID deaths per million people since the September 1, 2020 onset of the second wave. That is used to estimate “excess deaths”, those which were unlikely to have occurred had the Premier in question chosen to follow international best practices. Australia’s 20-deaths-per-million figure has been chosen for that benchmark for several reasons. While far from the world’s best (New Zealand, for example is only 0.6 per million), Australia is more comparable to Canada in terms of its population (26 million), culture, history, economy and the fact that its public health decisions fall within the purview of its individual Premiers. The fact that Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island both did better than Australia lends credence to it serving as an achievable benchmark for Canada. So, why then were Canadians subjected to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths?
To fairly compare those Premiers’ respective performances, this chart focuses on deaths occurring in the second and subsequent waves, by which point much more was known and each province went its own way in terms of what measures to adopt and when. The key metric for comparison is their respective COVID deaths per million people since the September 1, 2020 onset of the second wave. That is used to estimate “excess deaths”, those which were unlikely to have occurred had the Premier in question chosen to follow international best practices. Australia’s 20-deaths-per-million figure has been chosen for that benchmark for several reasons. While far from the world’s best (New Zealand, for example is only 0.6 per million), Australia is more comparable to Canada in terms of its population (26 million), culture, history, economy and the fact that its public health decisions fall within the purview of its individual Premiers. The fact that Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island both did better than Australia lends credence to it serving as an achievable benchmark for Canada. So, why then were Canadians subjected to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths?
Fairness dictates that provincial governments be given something of a pass on the first wave’s deadly outcomes because so little was known when the virus first emerged and all of them took quite similar measures. That excuse doesn’t cut it for the outcomes of the three subsequent waves. Given that all nations were facing the same virus, their differing approaches represented hundreds of real-world experiments in what worked best and what didn’t in suppressing COVID-19 outbreaks. Rational, evidence-based
leadership would have applied our brightest minds to teasing out the policies which had proven most effective in comparable nations and would have applied those expensively-learned lessons to our own circumstances. Instead, we smugly concluded that we had done better that our neighbours to the south, ignoring the obvious fact that they has been among the world’s worst performers. As most countries began moving into the second wave, our provinces muddled through based on short-term political expediency and their governing parties’ respective ideologies.
The most important lessons were consistent across all four waves to date. Those jurisdictions which decisively imposed classic pandemic social distancing measures at the first sign of serious new outbreaks were generally successful in suppressing them, whereas those whose leaders dragged their feet were consistently overwhelmed. Well-resourced and well-organized tracing and isolation of all close contacts of the newly-infected enabled the suppression of localized outbreaks, mostly avoiding the need for further national-scale lockdowns. But, that level of contact tracing breaks down when the rate of new infections saturates the capacity to identify all those potentially infected. Once that daily rate exceeds something like 100 new cases per million, it is very hard to bring back down to safer levels. The inevitable consequence of lifting restrictions when the daily rate of new cases remained above a very low level (somewhere between 10 and 40 per million) was yet another deadly wave.
Root Causes
The above chart is based on death-rate statistics because they provide the most reliable and objective comparative metric for the real-world outcomes of our governments’ decisions. Most Canadians would agree our leaders’ highest duty in a global emergency is to do whatever it takes to protect the lives of their citizens. The numbers in the above chart constitute clear evidence of just how badly many of them failed in their execution of that fundamental duty.
The mind-boggling differences in outcomes among provinces and nations grappling with the same crisis at essentially the same time with the same range of policy tools at their disposal points to the inescapable conclusion that quality of leadership was primarily responsible for the mass deaths in jurisdictions in which those in power at the time lacked the experience and competence necessary to decisively implement proven solutions or chose not to act to in ways that would avoid those deaths. That conclusions leads to the obvious question of why here in Canada so many of our Premiers were manifestly the wrong people at the wrong time, yet were able to retain their positions and
despite a continuing string of bad decisions which resulted in the deaths of hundreds and thousands of the citizens who they had been elected to serve and protect.
One obvious answer lies in our habit of electing mostly majority governments. Canadian Premiers and Prime Ministers who enjoy majorities have become virtual dictators in the sense that between elections, they can and frequently do choose to ignore all opposing voices in pursuit of their personal agendas. Most in the current crop were elected prior to the onset of the pandemic when performance in the face of a life-threatening crisis was the furthest thought from any voter’s mind. Through most of Canada’s history, that quasi-dictatorial power was checked in part by strong caucuses, the MPs and MPPs who we as voters actually elect through our ballots. In recent years, however, those elected representatives have become increasingly subservient to the circle of unelected advisors in each party’s Leader’s Office. They are political operatives who serve at the whim of “The Leader” and whose careers are entirely dependent on that person remaining in office. This system in which contrary views and new ideas are so easily filtered out of the decision-making process has proven utterly inadequate to effectively and humanely deal with a complex, real-world crisis in which so many lives are at stake.
An arguably deeper question is why, at this time when Canada is facing the greatest challenge of most of our lifetimes, we are saddled with so many Premiers who were so unwilling or incapable of doing what had already proven successful elsewhere. The answer requires a hard look at our increasingly dysfunctional political culture and, specifically, the way that our major political parties choose their leaders. More than a decade ago when climate change motivated me to get politically involved in the hope of having a stronger say on that issue, membership mattered, providing interested Canadians with a meaningful voice in our chosen party’s policies (the COVID experience having since moved me back to a non-partisan stance). Leadership candidates were typically well known to their members and tended to have long track records in public service which facilitated informed decisions on their relative merits. In the intervening years, those parties have ostensibly “opened up” to everyone but the reality is that real membership been replaced by easily-manipulated email lists. Leadership contests are now determined by the “instant” members signed up by the candidates, who have increasingly been angry, divisive, US-style outsiders lacking any real experience in the ever more complex task of actually governing. Given majority governments, they can and, in this case, have proven to be disasters. Electoral reform is necessary to reduce the risk of majorities, but would not be sufficient without reforming the ways that parties choose those who will appear on the ballot.