Why is no one managing Canada's pandemic crisis?
How our political leaders and medical officers of health have failed us
The problem with Canada’s approach to managing the pandemic crisis is as simple as it is devastating: no one is actually managing the pandemic crisis. Even worse, government hasn’t yet realized it’s not doing its job.
First, a brief and hopefully illustrative flashback…
It was blistering hot. The sun was beating down on the arid wasteland that was no-man’s land between Israeli and Syrian armies on the Golan Heights – even hotter was the blast coming off the out-of-control flames rapidly licking their way across the grassland toward a lonely UN outpost.
It was a hot summer day in 1991 and I was the operations officer for the Canadian Contingent to the UN Disengagement and Observer Force protecting the “Area of Separation” between the warring states of Israel and Syria. The Canadian unit provided logistical support to the UN force – supplies, transportation, vehicle maintenance and communications. I was the only combat arms officer in the unit and my job was to prepare for and manage crises when they arose.
This was one of those crises.
A wildfire that had begun kilometres away had burned through the Syrian countryside, into the no-go zone and was now threatening the outpost at Charlie Gate – our own little “Checkpoint Charlie” on the only road between Syria and Israel.
I had one professional military firefighter who worked for me during emergencies and we had trained a cohort of Canadian mechanics, finance clerks and cooks to fight fires as a secondary duty. About a dozen of them were bravely fighting the fire, wrangling hoses attached to a large water tanker – our “fire truck.”
The thing with crises of any kind is that those who are working at the front line – paramedics at a crash, infantrymen in combat, firefighters attacking flames – very quickly dial-in to the “three-foot world” around them. Their vision telescopes until all they see is the menace in front of them – the one they’re responsible for.
In this case: the fire.
As a result of this loss of peripheral vision, our firefighters were inching toward the fire – trying to extend the reach of their hoses. They were there to fight fire. And they unconsciously advanced toward it. Even the fire chief who was focused on manouevring his assets to extinguish the blaze, coaxed them forward.
My job, as Incident Commander, was to hold them back.
I didn’t know how to fight fires. That wasn’t my job. My job was to be their peripheral vision. I had to see all the threats surrounding us and apply judgment to balance the risks.
You see, this wild fire was burning through an area littered with high-explosive land mines designed to kill or maim people and destroy tanks. Every so often, one of the anti-tank mines would cook-off in the heat and a booming thump would send dirt and rocks 30 metres into the sky.
Death by landmine or death by fire is just as dead.
I moved behind the line, talking to the fire chief on the radio – watching as the firefighters leaned-in to the blaze. When they got too close to the minefield they’d all forgotten about, I’d remind the chief to pull them back. In many cases, I physically grabbed guys by the collars of their turnout coats and hauled them back a few yards – reminding them of the mines.
They’d lost track of where they were in relation to the mines. All they could see – until shaken – was fire.
Fire and landmines weren’t the only threats, either. Poorly trained and terrified Syrian officers were likely to shoot anyone who wandered too close to their fence – even if it was a Canadian firefighter bent on saving Syrian lives.
This peripheral blindness is not limited to fire fighting in middle eastern minefields.
We’re seeing this happen in real-time, right now, across Canada.
Our front-line workers are doing outstanding work battling the COVID-19 virus and saving the lives of those infected with it one-at-a-time. But, like anyone on any front line anywhere, these front-line healthcare heroes now live largely in a three-foot world, apart from the rest of us. All they know is what’s in front of them.
This patient. Right now. This outbreak. Right here. Their peripheral vision is gone.
ER doctors plead, “If you could spend one day in my ER, you’d have a different perspective.” Yes you would. They’re absolutely right. But, you wouldn’t see the whole story – you wouldn’t see all the risks in play. Neither do those doctors. They cannot. It’s impossible.
Families of COVID-19 victims say, “You would think differently if your mother/father/son/daughter died of the virus.” Yes you would. They’re absolutely right. But, you wouldn’t see what’s happening to the 37.5 million Canadians who did not contract the virus.
With few exceptions, Medical Officers of Health across Canada have narrowed their world down to a few metrics related to the virus. They see nothing else. That’s all that exists within three-feet of their eyes right now. They can’t see where they are in relation to normal. They have no awareness of other hazards facing the public not afflicted with COVID-19 – that’s outside their three-foot world.
Political leaders have retreated to their own three-foot world of medical advice and re-election calculus. How can they do what their medical advisors say? The problem is, their medical advisors are not seeing the whole problem.
And that, in a nut shell, is the biggest problem of all.
No one is managing the pandemic crisis in Canada. There is no “Incident Commander.”
Everyone is fighting “the virus.” But, the virus is not the crisis. No one is standing back and managing the crisis.
Sure, the virus is a new and unknown risk. And, most medical professionals – including all of those advising our elected leaders – are focused on it. But, in focusing on the virus, they’ve forgotten to watch out for the landmines.
The “cure” being prescribed by these doctors may be a great solution for the virus. I’m not qualified to judge the virology.
But, their cure is also hurting and killing people in its own right. Nobody fighting the virus has enough bandwidth – peripheral vision – to see it. That’s normal. And, entirely predictable. And yet, still, no one in authority has recognized the absence of a broader view. I am qualified to judge that. So are you.
This should have been the job of our elected leaders. Arguably, one of the great strengths of representative democracy is we elect politicians who don’t know much about anything – and we expect them to listen to experts, then balance the conflicting advice those experts will inevitably provide, and choose the path that best suits the needs of the most people.
In this crisis, our politicians have failed us.
They’ve hidden behind one particular type of expert to the exclusion of all others. Worse, they don’t even realize that’s what they’re doing.
Medical Officers of Health are good at one thing. But, we’re relying on them to decide everything. And, like everyone, they’re not particularly good at everything – worse, they don’t even see there is anything else but a virus.
Your not believable Mark. Every medical professional who speaks on the nightly newscasts talks about this balance. Many of them in fact highly question the views of Dr. David Williams and Doug Ford. You are right about politicians not managing the crisis though. As you said that’s not because they are only managing it in relation to what might keep them in power. As PHU are an arm of the government they tow the line between science and the government pressure to keep the economy open. It’s obviously designed to nudge the peanut forward appeasing all sides while they pray for a vaccine bailout. They’ve abdicated all responsibilities to strained PHUs because they’ve got them where they want them. It’s the perfect embedded spin.