Never let it be said that Canadian bureaucracies can’t learn on the fly. In a March 2021 report, federal Auditor General Karen Hogan found that from March to June 2020, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) could only verify that one-third of people who were supposed to be quarantining upon arrival in Canada had done so. By mid-2021, however, much progress had been made: A follow-up report released this week found that between January and June of this year, PHAC had only lost track of 37 per cent of incoming travelers.
The incompetence laid bare in Hogan’s reports this week is so all-pervading that it’s difficult even to start arguing what should be done about it. You can’t fix decades of yawning complacency in a year and a half, even in extremis. That hotel-bound woman did provide a good example of exactly what we shouldn’t conclude, though: one, that any of this is surprising; or two, that Canada’s pandemic experience might have been hugely different had some other party been in charge.
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