Questions about Covid-19:
What have we learned?

Dear @JustinTrudeau & @theJagmeetSingh:

In June 2021, I sent you a white paper on lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic. I received no reply. To convince me you've learned from the pandemic and earn my vote, please answer the following questions:

When will you ask the Supreme Court to clarify the federal right to act during a pandemic to reconcile the 1985 Emergencies Act and the 2007 Emergency Management Act?
When will you give Canada’s Global Public Health Intelligence Network domestic pandemic monitoring group "teeth"? Will you treat their warnings as de facto national emergencies until proven otherwise?
Will you encourage stronger ties between Canadian and foreign epidemiologists to provide outbreak monitoring in parallel to formal communication among government agencies? Will you listen to what they learn?
When will you develop a “best practices” pandemic response plan that won’t just sit on the shelf, ignored, and that will account for Canadian constraints such as the federal–provincial division of powers?
A rapid response to pandemics is essential. When will you provide specific deadlines and benchmarks for success rather than vague feel-good statements?
What will your plan be for regular updating of the action plan to account for new knowledge? Will you implement annual or semi-annual testing and revision?
What protocols will you establish for rapidly ending travel to and from areas that are experiencing a disease outbreak? What will your timeline be for implementing those protocols?
How and how often will you test the best practices action plan to detect and solve problems such as changes in the social and technological contexts?
How will you set quantitative targets for the increase in the number of cases before lockdown is required and the number before lockdown is relaxed? When will you implement a consistent national standard?
How will you ensure a smooth transfer of pandemic governance after elections? How will you ensure nothing falls between the cracks?
How will you train government representatives and scientists to better communicate complex science to the public? This isn’t something that comes with a PhD; it’s an entirely separate skill.
When will you establish a national communication plan on how to send a single, consistent message throughout the country? How will you communicate the concept of inherent uncertainty without alienating listeners?
When will you establish formal mechanisms to ensure smooth communication between federal and provincial governments rather than relying on ad hoc emergency committees with no standard protocol for cooperation?
How will you communicate the need for and enforce unpopular and disruptive measures such as quarantines, gym and restaurant closures, and mask mandates?
When will you implement a consistent national contact tracing system to ensure that any Canadian can participate in any province and use the same software wherever they travel in Canada?
When will you identify the need for support for special-needs communities such as seniors, people with handicaps, and indigenous peoples? When will you implement this support?
How will you replace vital services provided by schools, such as “daycare”, meals, and assistance with medication scheduling?
When will you identify a list of critical medical supplies, implement a national inventory system for tracking them, and assign responsibility for filling the list and ensuring that stocks are used and replaced before they become stale-dated?
How will you solve the problem of reliance on fragile international supply chains during a pandemic? How will you guarantee domestic production of critical goods and materials?
When you create a domestic vaccine production facility in cooperation with Moderna, how will you ensure that it remains able to produce vaccines if vaccine production ceases between disease outbreaks?
Will you, before the next pandemic, negotiate agreements with manufacturers of vaccines and other critical materials so the agreements will already be in place when the next pandemic strikes?
How will you inspect manufacturers that accept government funding to ensure their compliance with government guidelines and any agreements they sign? Given that self-regulation doesn’t work, how will you regulate them?
When will you establish specialized pandemic hospitals in each province that serve as centers of excellence during a pandemic? Will you designate secondary hospitals for other crucial needs such as surgery?
What are your plans for future pandemics of non-respiratory diseases, such as the mosquito-borne tropical diseases that are migrating north under climate change?
When will you identify the gaps in our healthcare system that have resulted from underfunding and provide the necessary funding for paramedical workers? When will you cross-train medical professionals to reduce the burden on medical specialists?
When will you recruit more professionals from medical-related fields (paramedical workers) to support front-line medical workers? When will you give nurses training opportunities to improve their skills and pay?
When will you improve resources for PTSD counselling, grief counselling, psychological counseling, and social workers who can facilitate access to home care and government services for recovering patients?
What are your plans to support patients recovering from “long covid”? When will they be implemented?
When will you set national training standards for staff at long-term care facilities and how will you monitor compliance with those standards? We know that self-regulation doesn’t work.
When will you seek and train volunteers who can relieve pressure on medical and paramedical workers by performing non-specialist tasks? Will you train these people following the model of first aid and CPR courses?
How will you encourage companies to continue letting employees work from home in the long term? When will you create a best practices guide to help companies plan for this shift?
When will you investigate the use of and promote the development of open-source and licensed solutions for medical equpment such as ventilators and personal protective equipment such as face masks?
When will you sign agreements with manufacturers for a license to manufacture proprietary materials such as pharmaceuticals that are currently protected by patents. Will you negotiate these agreements now so you don’t have to negotiate during a crisis?
When and how will you identify weak logistics links, and particularly “single points of failure”? How will you strengthen these links and develop alternatives for when they break?
How will you guarantee food security for people who lose their jobs or who cannot leave their home to seek food?
When will you protect Canadian agriculture by facilitating access to migrant workers and developing supplemental tools to ensure that farmers can transport their products to market?
When will you implement rules for corporate pandemic responses? Will you require companies to set aside an annual percentage of their net profits, before CEO bonuses and dividends, to establish a pandemic reserve fund for their staff?
If bailouts become necessary, will they take the form of stock purchases, at the current market stock price, rather than cash grants with weak or no strings attached? Will you give the government (as a major stockholder) a voice in how companies treat their employees.
How will you enhance economic and social support services during a pandemic?
When will you index welfare payments and emergency-response benefits to food prices? When will you streamline the application process so nobody is forced to wait for payments to arrive before they can eat?
When will you formally investigate a universal basic income? When will you formally determine whether such a program is less expensive than the high cost of ad hoc emergency funding that wasn’t included in government budgets?
When will you implement legislation that, when invoked in an emergency, suspends loan repayments (e.g., mortgages), freezes rents, bans evictions—and also compensates banks, other lenders, and landlords for lost income?
When will you implement an enforceable national standard for paid sick leave during pandemic? The Canada Sickness Recovery Benefit has been too slow, and has created avoidable conflicts with the provinces.
When will you implement in-school and extracurricular programs to teach Canadians emotional and psychological resilience?
When will you review and improve the current system for voting by mail to ensure it can eliminate the need for in-person voting if that becomes an unacceptable health risk?
When will you develop a plan to guide responses to both new and familiar diseases that will be exacerbated by global warming? Who will prioritize these diseases for monitoring?
Will you develop a national network of safe refuges for people affected by extreme weather events such as the 1998 ice storm in eastern Canada and the 2021 wildfires in western Canada? How will these shelters cope with a simultaneous pandemic?
How will you protect crucial infrastructure such as electricity and water during periods with severe weather, which will increase in frequency and severity due to global warming?
How do you plan to review and update the science related to epidemics to identify and correct outdated and incorrect science, such as the early belief that covid-19 did not spread via aerosols? How will you modify the action plan to account for this?
When will you adopt the “precautionary principle” as an integral part of Canada’s pandemic response? When we have a plausible disease spread mechanism and a way to reduce the spread without causing harm, will you implement that solution rather than waiting for perfect data?
When will you perform a functional and economic post-mortem of Canada’s pandemic response, with the explicit goal of fixing the problems rather than just documenting them?
Pandemic response plans existed before Covid-19, but were not tested and were not implemented. How will you solve that problem with future plans?
Who (name names!) will be responsible, as part of their job description, for ensuring that the federal action plan is kept up to date, tested periodically, and kept ready to implement rapidly when the next pandemic strikes?
Historically, the problem with “action” plans is that they have been all plan, with no action. When will you change that by henceforth naming deliverables, the people responsible, and the delivery schedule?
How will you change my recommendations from reactive (responding to an emergency) to proactive (preventing, mitigating, or slowing the emergency)? What will you do every year from now on?
Why didn’t Canada implement what we learned from SARS and MERS? How will you ensure that doesn’t happen again? What’s your action plan for the next pandemic?
How will the federal government communicate more clearly and consistently next time to avoid mixed messages that led to confusion and distrust of the government response?

Questions about Covid-19: What have we learned?

Questions about Covid-19:
What have we learned?