Sabrina Maddeaux: Trudeau receives international condemnation for his pandemic failures

Sabrina Maddeaux: Trudeau receives international condemnation for his pandemic failures

A scathing new series of reports in the British Medical Journal shows that Canadian leaders have a lot to answer for

Author of the article:Sabrina Maddeaux

Published Jul 25, 2023  A woman visits her 86-year-old mother through a window at the Orchard Villa long-term care home in Pickering, Ont., during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. PHOTO BY VERONICA HENRI/TORONTO SUN/POSTMEDIA NETWORK

A scathing new editorial and series of reports published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ), one of the world’s most respected peer-reviewed publications, takes Canada to task for its many pandemic failings — going so far as to recommend Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s most abhorred three-word phrase: independent public inquiry.

The reports paint a bleak picture of a country that managed to avoid more disastrous outcomes, not due to competent leadership, but thanks to a signature combination of good luck and the goodwill of Canadians. This shouldn’t provide anyone with comfort, as luck always runs out when faced with systemic dysfunction, and government actions — or lack thereof — left many Canadians disenfranchised, disillusioned and rightfully angry.

On the surface, Canada could be mistaken for a COVID-19 success story. “An evaluation two years into the pandemic said the country had lower COVID case and death burdens and higher vaccination coverage than most other G10 countries, despite Canada’s low hospital and critical care capacity and its vast geographical area that makes care delivery challenging,” reads the BMJ’s editorial.

However, deeper analysis reveals a country that skated by in spite of its elected leaders. From the near complete collapse of long-term care homes (LTCHs), to data vacuums, fragmented government co-ordination and communications, playing politics with vaccines and allowing for vastly unequal outcomes that took the largest tolls on the most vulnerable populations, especially First Nations communities, Canadian leaders have a lot to answer for.

The death and misery that consumed our LTCHs has never been properly accounted for. It’s understandable why many would rather forget the horrific scenes that played out in these homes. Elderly Canadians left for weeks in soiled diapers. Seniors crying out for help as bed bugs literally ate them alive. Patients given expired medication, sedated with narcotics for being sad, force fed until they choked and abandoned to suffer from bed ulcers. And then there was the actual virus.

“Canada’s long term care homes — including residents, their family and friend caregivers, and staff — experienced among the highest proportion of deaths among all COVID-19 deaths worldwide,” reads one of the BMJ reports.

No one can say they weren’t warned. “This crisis was predicted in more than 100 reports and inquiries over the 50 years preceding the pandemic,” write the authors. “Indeed, pre-pandemic mortality in Canada’s LTCHs was among the highest in the world, almost 50 per cent over one year.”

Yet when it comes to LTCHs, an independent public inquiry doesn’t seem nearly adequate enough. It’s not that we didn’t know, or don’t know now, what was wrong or how to fix it; it’s that the owners of the homes, and the governments who oversee them, refuse to. In any other context, what happened to seniors inside our long-term care facilities would be criminal. Instead, provincial governments moved to shield operators from lawsuits.

Canada’s COVID shortcomings didn’t only affect us, but people around the world. The BMJ reports spotlight the wide gap between how our federal government portrays itself on the world stage and what it actually does. While Trudeau publicly committed to share vaccines with lower-income countries, he never followed through in any meaningful way.

Quite the opposite. “Internationally, Canada contributed to devastating COVID losses by not sharing enough COVID vaccine and disrupting global supply, and it was named the world’s chief hoarder,” reads the BMJ editorial. “Canada was judiciously ungenerous and unsavvy in its global behaviour, despite repeated pledges by its prime minister to deliver global solidarity during COVID-19.”

Even now, nearly 20-million vaccine doses in Canada are set to expire by the end of 2023. Most will go unused, yet there’s no sign of a plan to share them with countries that could use them.

The federal government must also answer for its continued failure to offer First Nations communities the most basic services and its stubborn determination to ignore the substandard living conditions of our ever-growing number of temporary foreign workers.

“Despite ostensibly universal health care, the highest rates of COVID cases and deaths in Canada were among people already disadvantaged: racialised ethnic groups, migrant workers, essential service workers and those living in crowded housing,” write the editorial’s authors. “For some Indigenous peoples in Canada living on reserves, appalling lack of access to basic needs such as clean water rendered early COVID hygiene advice impracticable.”

The pandemic should’ve been a wake-up call that all the virtue signalling and moral grandstanding in the world can’t replace effective policy. But this is a lesson the Trudeau Liberals still refuse to learn.

As we continue to see on the foreign interference file, asking politicians to launch investigations into their own practices is rarely successful. While the BMJ editorial makes a clear and pressing case for an independent public inquiry, I wouldn’t throw away money betting on one.

The governments that failed us during the pandemic aren’t going to hold themselves to account. They’d much rather we forget about the period entirely. It’s up to voters to remember, to loudly demand better and, if they don’t get it, to force accountability at the ballot box.