Friday, July 28, 2023

Murray Mandryk: COVID-19 inquiry may explain why we can't pull together

Opinion by Murray Mandryk • Yesterday 

Did Saskatchewan bail on the COVID-19 crisis too early? 
A national pandemic inquiry might tell us that.
 Provided by Leader Post

We used to be pretty good in this country at coming together in a crisis … or so it seemed.

Every small Saskatchewan town or big Ontario city has a testimonial to this — usually, a First or Second World War memorial built by our grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

Such symbols remind us of our struggles, but mostly they proudly remind us of who we are and what we do so well.

We are modestly proud people. We may be more apologetic people than boastful, but we know how we have always defied distance, weather and inhospitable landscapes and have come together in times of crisis.

We have done so, regardless of whether the crisis was a natural or manmade one.

Wars. Economic collapse. Natural disasters beyond our power. Even our willingness to provide public health care that was as tough a fight as most.

We’ve always demonstrated a remarkable capacity to pull together in a crisis.

So why is it that we can’t seem to come together now as we face two of the biggest crises of our lifetime: COVID-19 and climate change?

In a series of editorials, including in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), some of the country’s top medical experts are calling on the federal government to hold a national inquiry into this country’s “major pandemic failures” that would examine our high pandemic death rates — especially in lower-income communities and nursing homes.

It could even address why none of the life-saving vaccine was developed and manufactured in Canada — a pertinent question, given that we should have had a leg up with the work of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO) attached to the University of Saskatchewan.

All such issues are especially important here in Saskatchewan, where we suffered horribly from COVID-19 outbreaks in isolated and impoverished northern communities like La Loche and from the devastation in long-term care homes that required the government to step in.

Did decisions like Premier Scott Moe’s eagerness to be the first in the country to lift COVID-19 restrictions — the direct outcome of succumbing to anti-vaccine lobbyists who gained his ear — contribute to higher-than-reasonable deaths here? How did our handling of the crisis compare with elsewhere?

“We wouldn’t know because no pandemic inquiry has been established by (Canada’s) federal government,” an editorial stated. “This is a mistake.”

Sadly, we can’t even say with any certainty how many actual deaths there were in Saskatchewan, because we were also among the first to stop collecting detailed data on COVID-19 cases.

Conservative politicians here — federal, provincial, retired, active — were also among the biggest supporters of those who trucked to Ottawa in the so-called “Freedom Convoy” to wreak as much havoc as possible on the federal government, the people of that city and even international border crossings, where they blocked trade and travel.

Such protesters wrapped themselves in the Canadian flag — about the most un-Canadian thing imaginable.

It seemed the opposite of what we have always done so well, which is to pull together in times of crisis.

But one of the big problems right now is that we can’t say with certainty what went wrong during the pandemic. Worse, today’s politicians really don’t seem to want to find out.

As much as such an inquiry would likely be a major source of embarrassment for a federal Liberal government in constant election mode, it would not make the federal Conservative opposition or their allies running governments like the one in Saskatchewan look especially good, either.

This is becoming a sadly familiar story.

Like much of the climate change debate, the first calculation in today’s political discourse is the political advance.

We need to find out what we did wrong because we will very likely have a pandemic crisis again.

But, also like climate change, the first calculation should be how we all can get through a crisis together.

We’re not good at this anymore. We used to be great at it.

Mandryk is the political columnist for the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.

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