Category: Chairman’s Desk

As the country struggles through the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have finally obtained enough distance from the first wave to consider it properly in hindsight.

In those early days of the pandemic, when we knew so little and feared so much, governments around the world tried all manner of policy responses. Among the most popular was some form of travel restriction or border closure: by some measures, international travel restrictions were the second most popular policy response, after public information campaigns.

If you were to listen to the global public health community’s response to this initial wave of closures and restrictions, you might think it was among the most disastrous decisions of the pandemic. The conventional wisdom was that travel restrictions were at best unhelpful, and at worst actively counterproductive.

This truism and the beliefs that underpin it — that disease does not respect borders, that people will find a way to travel regardless, and they will go through dangerous unofficial channels if you close official ones — all dovetails perfectly with the general left-wing viewpoint on immigration.

Though it may be politically congenital to those who wish to see open borders, the public health opposition to border closures was not grounded in any real scientific fact. It was based on hunches about human behaviour.

In fact, one of the professors who authored the international pandemic playbook for the World Health Organization (which recommended against border closures) was quoted in Vox last week, saying “I have now realized that our belief about travel restrictions was just that — a belief. It was evidence-free.”

This is a shocking admission. If the idea had no evidence underpinning it, then why was it so popular? Here in Toronto, we survived both the SARS pandemic and the travel advisories imposed on the city by the WHO. As a result, we were very familiar with the potentially damaging effects of travel restrictions. Perhaps a lingering sense of grievance contributed to the desire to avoid border closures this time around.

Eventually, most public health authorities concluded that travel restrictions did nothing to prevent SARS, and that they inflicted a great deal of suffering and economic damage on cities like Toronto.

In the years since, through scares like Ebola or MERS, travel restrictions similarly didn’t seem to work well. And so the belief that border closures don’t work, full stop, became the kind of conventional wisdom that can all too often be confused with scientific fact.

As countries scrambled to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, they imposed border closures and travel restrictions, but based on political objections such as those cited above, these policies were porous to varying degrees. Even former U.S. president Donald Trump, who often touted his decision to close the border to China, left too many loopholes for the policy to be truly effective.

But while most countries included some manner of loophole, a few chose to go the full nine yards. Again with the benefit of hindsight, it seems possible to attribute those countries’ success in combating COVID to that fateful decision.

Take the country of Vietnam: at the end of 2020, the country had reported only 35 deaths from COVID. They had a paltry 1,465 cases over those first nine months of the pandemic, a fraction of its neighbours, including nearby China where the virus originated.

Experts now attribute this astonishing success in large part to the border closure. The country has also taken other policy interventions, such as test, trace and isolate, much more seriously — though even these additional measures are made possible by their low case count. Other countries that have experienced comparatively better outcomes, like Taiwan or New Zealand, have also featured extremely intense international border closures.

This is only one area in which we are beginning to reassess the conventional wisdom that has guided our response to date, and reconsider our steps and missteps in the earliest days of the pandemic. This episode speaks to the fallibility of our top doctors and public health authorities. If there is one clear lesson here, we must never allow what is politically convenient to guide our response, whether the issue is border closures, travel restrictions or vaccine allocations.

As the pandemic marches inevitably on toward its second summer of lockdowns and physical distancing, it can be easy to lose notice of just how much our lives have changed.

This is especially true, I think, for those of us who have grown accustomed to working from home and to the reliable, quiet drift of each day into the next that comes with it.

We may not miss the jetsam of our former lives — the habits and activities we were able to gladly throw overboard in the face of COVID-19. But the flotsam of this pandemic, the chaos and destruction it has caused, the upheaval of entire neighbourhoods, is a reality we can’t escape.

Nowhere is this wreckage more pronounced than in the ghost town of Toronto’s PATH system.

These days, a stroll through the PATH is a stark reminder that the office as we knew it has been turned entirely upside down. For many companies, this pandemic has been a forced foray into the world of working from home, or as some wags prefer: live at work.

For the most part, employees seem to be content with the changes to their routine. In fact, a recent poll of Canadians suggests that one in three would look for a new job if asked to return to the office full-time. That is a remarkable figure, especially given the precarity and general insecurity many are still feeling about their lives, their future and their work.

What’s more, it speaks to the reality that is dawning on the other end of this pandemic. Just as they had to adapt last year, employers need to prepare for a return to work that is responsive to all that has changed — and with it the new expectations of their employees.

I don’t belong to the category of those who think we will never return to the office. Quite the opposite. In my view, people will return to the office, in part, because they miss their old lives. But also because business imperatives will push us back.

Fundamentally, there are three crucial things that are lost without the chance to work together in the same space.

First, the element of companionship and camaraderie that solidifies our working relationships. Part of what’s missing in a virtual workplace is the natural ebb and flow of professional and personal time. In the office, we go from coffee to meetings to lunch and then back to work, all the while establishing enriching personal bonds.

Second, we lose the opportunity for collaboration and collision to organically improve the work we do. No chance for a conversation overheard or some coincidental synergy to make all the difference to a project. Something that given the tightness and closeness of our country, matters more to us than most.

Finally, without a return to the office, we lose much of the benefit of mentorship — which just cannot have the same impact in remote work. This is especially a loss for younger professionals, who won’t have the opportunity for crucial advancement and learning from their colleagues.

There, three quick reasons why the office is not dead — yet. But I also recognize that change is necessary. The best answer? Most likely a hybrid model, where solitary work that can be done with minimal collaboration is done in a new way, while work that requires collaboration is conducted (at least more often) in a shared space.

And, of course, we must recognize that for all the changes we can expect to our physical office experience, the policies that underpin our work life will need to change too.

Many companies will be more flexible about work schedules. Some will reconfigure how workload is allocated. Our own firm has implemented a policy of unlimited vacation, recognizing that strict allotments of vacation time are out of sync with the reality of how we now work and live our lives.

Whatever the specific solutions, the important thing is for business leaders to recognize the tide of change that’s taken place, and adapt accordingly.

This has become a dispiriting phase of the pandemic. This week, Ontario slammed the emergency brake on — again.

At times like this, as we enter our second year of missing Passovers, Easters and birthdays — feeling like we are all being held hostage to a string of disheartening failures — it can help to take the long view.

I’ve written in this space before that COVID-19 is the second pandemic that I have lived through — the first one being the HIV-AIDS crisis weathered in the 1980s and 1990s.

And while you can’t comparatively rate loss and pain, despair then seemed endlessly prolonged by a string of failures, and because of the lack of a pharmaceutical salvation.

It has been 40 years since researchers started looking for an HIV vaccine, and the story has been one of failure after bitter failure. Even some of the characters in that pandemic — like Dr. Anthony Fauci — are reappearing in this one, the same then as now.

So it made for some welcome good news this week to learn that, according to a new paper published by economist Jeffrey E. Harris at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all of those failures have amounted to something precious indeed.

Harris finds that more than 85 per cent of the technology powering the COVID-19 vaccine candidates can be traced back to prototypes tested in HIV vaccine trials, from the synthetic mRNA in Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, to the viral-vector model used by Johnson & Johnson in their single-shot COVID-19 vaccine.

There is a certain poetic beauty in this realization. After a long winter of suffering and discontent, there comes a hopeful spring. (This is true in HIV-AIDS research as well, which still has no vaccine, but does have a prophylactic in the form of Truvada, a once-daily pill that can prevent HIV infection, in addition to the breakthrough antiretrovirals that truly turned the tide back in the mid-1990s.)

But in Harris’ finding, there is also an important lesson for the rest of us.

And by the rest of us, I mean here is where politicians and policy-makers can learn from scientists. Success can grow from failure — but only if we are honest with ourselves, rigorous and transparent in our approach, and clear-eyed about what works and what doesn’t.

The difficult part is that we can never know which failures or dead ends today will be redeemed tomorrow. That process begins with a clinical examination of what went wrong, and we are in the earliest stages of that process, even as we continue to grapple with COVID-19 in real time.

Auditor General of Canada Karen Hogan’s recently released report is only the first of what will no doubt become an entire genre of bureaucratic literature: the COVID-19 post-mortem.

In her report, Hogan found that the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) was unprepared for the pandemic, with some of the issues marring the early response to COVID having been flagged as far back as 20 years ago.

The picture of the agency that Hogan paints reflects a broader failing of the federal government, which is the atrophying of Canada’s state capacity (i.e., our ability to effectively mobilize its decision-making apparatus in a crisis). For a country that was traumatized by SARS to have a federal public health agency unprepared for a pandemic is inexplicable. It reflects a concerning inability to learn from our past failures.

On the other hand, it is not all doom and gloom. Hogan found that while PHAC’s response was fumbled, other branches of the federal government did an admirable job in quickly ushering out new support payments for workers and businesses in the pandemic’s early days.

If we accept that part of the reason for that decline in state capacity is our general inability to proceed without endless box-ticking and other forms of bureaucratic red tape, the rapid response exemplified by CEWS and CERB were the exception that made the rule. Turns out it actually was possible to move fast and adjust later.

These are our earliest learnings, but the trick will be to not be deaf to them. The trick will be to find the confidence to allow us to have our failure move us forward.　

The Supreme Court has spoken. Climate change — and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions — is a matter of national concern.

In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act is constitutional and that the federal government indeed has the authority to implement or require provinces to implement a minimum price on carbon.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Richard Wagner argued that the issue of reducing GHGs to address climate change meets the definition of a “matter of national concern” and thus can fall within Parliament’s exclusive jurisdiction.

In the majority’s view, climate change “is causing significant environmental, economic and human harm nationally and internationally, with especially high impacts in the Canadian Arctic, coastal regions and on Indigenous peoples.”

The majority also agreed that the provinces do not have sufficient ability to address climate change independently. Provincial governments, they reasoned, do not have authority to implement a consistent standard across the entire country and, further, the withdrawal or refusal of a single province or territory would “jeopardize its success in the rest of Canada.”

In short: we are all in this together.

The prime minister has used similar reasoning before. Speaking about the pricing act in Parliament in 2016, Trudeau remarked that “because pollution crosses borders, all provinces must do their part.”

The ruling itself is a gift to the Liberals ahead of another election, because it finally settles the prolonged debate over the constitutionality of the law. Opponents will continue to attack carbon pricing in the court of public opinion, but for now at least, the legal challenges have ended.

Beyond that, the language in the ruling is a boon for team Trudeau. Having identified climate change as a matter of national concern, the court’s decision seems to imply that a federal government — regardless of politics — is not just empowered but expected to take appropriate action. Canadians respect the impartiality of our highest court, so the language of the ruling will serve the Liberals well as they gear up for an election.

At the same time, the decision presents a unique challenge for the leader of the Opposition.

Last week, Erin O’Toole attempted to usher in a new era for his party by declaring, in his speech at the CPC policy convention, that the debate over the reality of climate change was “over.”

Not so fast.

Delegates later voted against a motion recognizing that climate change is real (albeit one with wider policy implications). After the vote, O’Toole continued with his stake in the ground by declaring, “I am in charge.”

And while he is indeed in charge, he is going to have to deal with the court’s commentary on the “national concern” standard and the responsibilities attached to it.

But here is where there may be a silver lining for O’Toole.

Notwithstanding the inevitable protests of Western MPs who fiercely oppose any form of carbon pricing, the party desperately needs a sincere strategy on climate action.

It has become rote for pundits — and pollsters — to say that the CPC cannot win another election without a serious climate plan, so why do we keep ignoring them?

My hope is that the settled legal case allows O’Toole some breathing room to develop a Conservative approach to carbon pricing — and in so doing, garner the party enough support in Ontario, and elsewhere, to win an election.

A genuine Conservative climate plan could achieve what O’Toole and his predecessor have failed to do to date: prove to Canadians that the CPC is a modern party, open to change, reflective of and responsive to their concerns.

Let the opponents find support in provincial governments who — like the three dissenting justices — can attack what they see as the law’s jurisdictional overreach rather than climate action generally.

Two elections and, now a decision of the Supreme Court, have settled this matter.

It is now time for the federal Conservatives to pick a different fight.