The Right Canadian Club (COVID-19)

Earlier this week, in a faraway so close country known as Canada, something illuminating happened. Roman Baber, a Progressive Conservative backbencher in the province of Ontario, attacked the strict new “lockdown” rules implemented by Premier and party leader Doug Ford, arguing that the threat from Covid-19 is overrated, the strains on hospitals exaggerated, and that the impact of suicides, domestic violence, and other harms attributed to shelter-in-place rules merited a reversal of this policy.  

Now by American standards Baber’s comments might mark him as something of a conservative intellectual. And Doug Ford is about as far right as one gets in Canada short of advocating provincial separatism. (His more flamboyant younger brother, the late Rob Ford, was famously Mayor of Toronto and a staple of late-night TV mockery due to his many escapades and scandals.) Doug Ford was once on record as being an “unwavering” supporter of Donald Trump, a bromance that faltered only when Trump imposed aluminum tariffs on Canada.  

So what happened? Ford booted Baber out of the party caucus and told him not to bother running again. While he was more than mindful of the disruptions caused by pandemic response, Ford told the backbencher to stop spreading misinformation, while reaffirming that the Premier was basing his decision on the advice of the province’s medical and public health experts. 

This is no broad defense of Ontario’s particular recent stay-at-home order, which is in fact plagued with inconsistencies and ambiguities. Nor is it to overlook that Canada, like every Western democracy, has had no end of missteps, controversies, setbacks, and failures related to its Covid-19 response, of which we haven’t yet seen the last. 

What distinguishes the Canadian response to Covid-19, like a number of other democracies with a federal system, is that federal and provincial leaders have by and large maintained a unified message on the virus despite their varying ideologies and differing local circumstances. This message has stressed the primacy of public health advice. And the federal government has cooperated with all of the provinces on more or less equal terms. 

There shouldn’t be anything too remarkable about a coordinated message toward a deadly virus that backs public health officials. Yet by contrast to, say, Governors Ron DeSantis or Kristi Noem--who have taken victory laps to celebrate their repudiation of public health advice— Doug Ford’s firm action makes him look like Benjamin Disraeli.

The consequences of staying on a consistent message toward the virus are clear, especially in democracies that have relatively little ability to restrict mobility or to enforce harsh stay-at-home orders. Compared to the United States, Canada has roughly one-third the Covid-19-related fatalities, on a per capita basis. One of its Atlantic provinces, Nova Scotia (whose population is similar to that of South Dakota) reported zero Covid-19 cases on January 10th. 

Some may argue that it is the reservoir of social trust among Canadians that is primarily responsible for its comparatively strong performance. There’s an old joke that asks “How do you get fifty Canadians to leave a swimming pool? You say, please get out of the swimming pool.”

But primarily it is the backing of a broad group of political and community leaders for a science-based policy that makes the biggest difference. Had a similar consensus behind an unshackled CDC been present in the United States— an agency that prior to Donald Trump was rated “best prepared for a pandemic” by its global peers in the ranks of epidemiology and science—an enormous measure of human tragedy could have been averted. 

On the same day as Ford dismissed his dissenting colleague, a large poll was released that included data on the Canadian public’s attitude toward their leaders and the nation’s coronavirus response. A majority expressed either “optimism” or “satisfaction” with the federal government and the favorability ratings for the governing Liberals jumped twenty points since the previous poll, even as worry about the recent surge of the coronavirus rose. 

I suspect that had Donald Trump, going against type, simply turned U.S. pandemic response over to scientists and public health officials, defended their work, and shown a bare modicum of compassion he would likely be celebrating his triumphant second inaugural this coming Wednesday.