If Ontario wants perfection, people will die
Perfect plans are a guarantee of failure
The Ontario government is under fire for a “troubling” “lack of control” in how it dispensed emergency assistance funds to business it ordered closed during #COVID19 pandemic lockdowns – according to Bonnie Lysyk, the province’s Auditor General.
Perhaps, the AG has forgotten what happened during the lockdowns. That’s understandable, considering she never lost a dime of salary while millions of Ontarians were ordered out of their jobs and went with incomes.
Perfection is the enemy of the good
In the army, I learned very quickly that “any decent plan, executed quickly and with energy (we called it violence) will succeed where a perfect plan executed too late or timidly will fail. I also learned on patrols that the smart move (if you wanted to survive) was to be bold and take your risks early.
Early on in the pandemic, the Ontario government ordered a lockdown. Given the lack of information about a virus that was spreading exponentially around the world and across the planet, and given our healthcare system is simply not very robust, this was a prudent move. It was a bold move, executed early. It didn’t need to be perfect.
Then the government extended and expanded the lockdowns until Ontario was locked down longer and harder than any other jurisdiction on Earth. This, at a time when we had a much better understanding of the risks involved. I have argued, and continue to argue, that this extensive lockdown hurt more people than it benefited. But, that’s not the point of this polemic.
During this unprecedented lockdown, the Ontario government – in fact all provincial governments in Canada – and the federal government started shovelling money out the door to help the people they were harming.
If you are a public servant, or a white-collar worker who worked from home – or a low-paid “frontline worker” who never stopped working during the lockdown, you had a very different “lockdown experience” than millions of your fellow Canadians.
For millions of Canadians - over 6 million at one point - “lockdown” meant poverty. They were legally ordered out of work. Their incomes stopped. Going into the pandemic, few Canadians had more than enough money on hand to pay their next rent bill. Most Canadians had more debt than savings. Losing their incomes and being unable to work was devastating for millions of us.
So, the government started shovelling money. The goal was to get it into people’s hands before they (literally) starved to death or killed themselves. That meant days, not weeks. And that meant dispensing with the routine bureaucracy of benefits programs.
That routine bureaucracy is designed to make sure no public beneficiary gets a penny more than she needs and not a minute longer than she needs it. On any good day in Canada, the infrastructure we’ve created to ensure nobody gets anything they don’t need routinely costs us more than it would cost to pay everyone who asked for help. But, that too is another topic for another day.
So, the byword for these pandemic funding programs was: speed. As it should be.
This was a crisis. People were dying from the virus. People were about to die from the lockdowns. Businesses are groups of people working together to put food on their tables. Businesses that failed during lockdowns meant millions of people permanent losing their jobs. Keeping business alive – in an environment where government had purposely made it illegal for them to operate – was imperative to the long term health of Canadians and Ontarians.
Turns out, some of the people the federal government gave money to through its CERB and other programs, didn’t need it. So, what? The point was speed. And, the federal government acted swiftly. Their speed saved lives. Millions were saved.
It also turns out, some of the businesses the Ontario government gave money to may not have needed it. So, what? The point here too was speed. And, the Ontario government also acted swiftly. Their speed saved businesses, which saved lives. Millions were saved.
Ontario AG criticizes government controls
In her Annual Report on “value for money,” Ontario’s auditor general found “the province focused on speed when delivering the programs rather than trying to ensure applicant-reported information was authentic and applicants were eligible.”
Thank God. Had government waited for applicants to find their own way through the maze of standard civil service bafflegab, many would be dead before they even applied.
It bears reiterating that Auditors General – including Ontario’s Bonnie Lysyk – didn’t lose a dime during the pandemic lockdown. Nor, I suspect, has she ever started and run a business employing hundreds or thousands of people with her own capital or her own home and the futures of her children on the hook in exchange for borrowed capital.
I’m not sure she’s the best person to determine who really needed what, when. But, that’s not her job. Her job is to point out the government didn’t follow its own rules during the pandemic. She’s done her job. So, what?
We all knew the government wasn’t following the rules during the pandemic. There are no rules that say, “close the economy and make work illegal for most citizens.” Government made millions of jobs illegal anyway. And, they stepped in with buckets of cash in an effort to mitigate the damage they, themselves, were causing. In large part, this was of necessity. Speed was essential for survival.
The rules weren’t written with crisis in mind. Perhaps, they should have been. We would all be better off with less bureaucracy, less red tape, fewer obstacles between those in need and those able to help them. That’s something to change for the future.
And, if there’s evidence somebody or some business committed fraud to get a benefit they shouldn’t have gotten – that’s a job for police and the courts. Lay charges. Throw the book at them. Recover the funds and a penalty.
But we can’t let people starve and businesses fail while a bunch of well-fed, not-to-be-inconvenienced civil servants double, triple and quadruple check to see how hungry these “beggars” really are.
Our governments – in Ottawa and at Queen’s Park in Toronto – acted rapidly. Some mistakes were made. So be it. I’m happy they did what they did. Waiting for a perfect benefit distribution plan would have resulted in thousands of people dying and millions of lives destroyed.
Thank you, Madame Auditor. But, no thank you.
Should the government have done a better job screening requests for pandemic benefits?