Don’t let politicians blame all of our health problems on the pandemic

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Earlier in the pandemic, a thought occurred to me. I think it was more than just “earlier” – it was downright early. Spring 2020, maybe? What occurred to me then, as I considered the responses at the federal and provincial levels, was that a quirk of Canada’s current political environment was going to produce a pitiful result. In a country where the federal government was made up of Liberals (a minority, but still), but where most of the provinces were led by Conservatives, we had a perfect scenario for avoiding accountability. Every conservative across the country, from prime ministers to people who generally identify vaguely as center-right, can avoid any responsibility or soul-searching by saying, hey, don’t blame us – the Prime Minister let go of the ball. And the Liberals, of course, whether they are CPM supporters or just Canadian bog moderates, will do the same: don’t look at Trudeau. It’s these nasty conservatives who screwed it up!

It was a depressing achievement in an already dark time, but nothing I’ve seen since has changed my mind. The truth is simple but grim: The pandemic has revealed that most Canadian jurisdictions – and most Canadian leaders – are in default. There are honorable exceptions, but, overall, COVID-19 has found Canadian leaders and institutions unprepared, slow to adapt, and prone to failure. The political successes that have taken place throughout this long chore don’t change the fundamental math here: COVID-19 has overwhelmed us, and in many ways, even two years later, we’re still trying to catch up.

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Anyway. This thought hasn’t gotten any happier since it first occurred to me. There will be commissions, inquiries, and task forces across the country when this is over, like there were after SARS, but we could have a billion reports on the pandemic, and it wouldn’t have any. importance unless someone in authority is willing to read them, learn from them and accept responsibility for what can be improved – to fix what has failed – within their own jurisdiction, even if the failures occurred under their watch.

It is not impossible. We will probably, almost in spite of ourselves, make some improvements and get better. I would really like to believe that this shared experience, with tens of thousands of deaths and all of our lives turned upside down, is going to force a change. But I’ve been a political writer longer than I’ve been through a pandemic, and I have to say I’m not optimistic that we’re going to change a lot. I think the ability to blame our political opponents is just too tempting here, and too easy, and will become even more tempting as the scale of failure and its costs increase.

This is likely to be especially true in the area of ​​health care reform (and recovery – the system is messed up and will take a long time to get back on its feet). Health care is already political football in this country. The Liberals and Conservatives (and the NDP, in a few provinces) have all shared the blame for so long. It is very easy to imagine politicians of all kinds preferring the high-level adjustments they believe they benefit, rather than the deep, painful and costly reforms that are probably needed.

So I just have one request from all of you. Don’t let them get away with it.

By “them” I mean any politician, at any level. And by “getting out of it” I mean something very specific. Don’t let them use the pandemic as an excuse for the state of the health care system. COVID-19 has it absolutely wild, but it has broken along existing fault lines. And the consequences of that, in terms of death and suffering, are simply a massive increase in the problems we already had.

I should note here that I am using the “health system” very broadly. I’m not just talking about hospitals. The long-term care system must also be part of this conversation. The same goes for community care and almost certainly parts of our public health teams (with lab testing and public communication being very obvious areas ready for improvement). This column is necessarily general; each of these elements alone is worth a series of articles.

The important thing here, however, is to understand that we are going to face for years the mess that COVID-19 has made of it, and the politicians who are handling the cleanup (who may or may not be the same as those who are doing it). supervised) will have both a motive and an opportunity to claim that COVID-19 was the problem on its own, and that when it clears and the backlogs are finally cleared, we’ll have done the hard work. Mission accomplished! Back to normal! The costs of the pandemic, both economic and human, will be minimized by those who want to treat it all as fluke – tragic and terrible, to be sure, but not really something with lessons that apply to them, once the pandemic hits. finished.

I repeat: don’t let them get away with it.

The pandemic was a rare event. We all hope to have seen the last thing like this in our lifetime. But, again, the places our system failed were predictable. We knew the long-term care system was a mess before the dying started. We knew the hospital system was too small and vulnerable to any sudden influx of patients. We knew that insufficient resources in the non-hospital sectors of the health system caused backlogs which produced not only human suffering but also congestion in hospitals, when people showed up and stayed there for lack of better options. And even before COVID, too many people waited damn too long for treatments that might not have saved lives but sure would improve their lives. Long wait times, hallway health care, huge waiting lists for mental health care, a bed in a long-term care home or a community care nurse – these are all issues. in 2019, and none of them were new.

And these are issues for which the blame is rife. People will want to pretend otherwise. Politicians, in particular, with limited resources to distribute, will want to blame anything that plagues the system on the emergency that began almost two years ago. They will be successful if we let them do it, so don’t. Don’t let them get away with it.

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