Dithering minister of everything should leave this one to the doctors By: Dan Lett Posted: 7:00 PM CST Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2020 Last Modified: 12:18 AM CST Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2020 Updates

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/11/2020 (1465 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When the history of Manitoba’s pandemic response is written, there will no doubt be a chapter on Premier Brian Pallister’s propensity to dither and delay on the tough decisions needed to keep COVID-19 in check.

To be clear, the biggest delays and dithering did not take place over the past week, when the provincial government imposed some — but not all — of the restrictions available under a code-red designation.

On Nov. 2, we reduced capacity for indoor public places and closed bars, restaurants, arenas and community centres, but we didn’t order people to shelter at home and we still allow non-essential businesses to remain open.

However, after a week of unprecedented tragedy at long-term care facilities, Pallister and Dr. Brent Roussin, the chief public health officer, finally exerted the full force of code red.

To be fair to all those involved in the pandemic response, it would be pointless to make too big a deal about what didn’t happen one week ago; had we brought in the so-called “short, sharp” lockdown a week ago, it likely would not have saved a single life.

But we can certainly look back even further, back into the late summer, and start to wonder aloud about what might have been if the province had been decisive in preparing for, and responding to, the inevitable second wave of the virus.

Going into the summer, Manitoba was the envy of the country. We’d had very low numbers of cases and hardly any deaths. But as summer began to creep towards Labour Day, things started to change.

Brandon and the Prairie Mountain Health Region saw an outbreak that required an orange-level designation. The daily count of new confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Winnipeg began to edge up slightly. Other areas of the country were seeing the same warning signs, and started to act.

In mid-August, Ontario and Quebec ordered their citizens to wear masks in all indoor public spaces. In Manitoba, however, the premier balked at imposing a mandatory mask order even though Roussin was strongly “recommending” masks at his thrice-weekly briefings.

It would take until Sept. 25 to issue the mandatory mask order. That delay is not only tragic, but it reveals a fundamental flaw in the decision-making structure of Manitoba’s pandemic response.

Most Manitobans know that while public-health experts inform the pandemic response, the final decisions on what to do and when to do it still rest with Pallister and his cabinet. That is important enough to repeat because, prior to the pandemic, it was well known in this province that the premier was “the minister of everything” as one senior government official put it recently.

Pallister not only demanded all major decisions go through him, but he developed a troublesome habit of changing policy or introducing new initiatives frequently and without warning, even to his own senior staff.

In a more normal time, this would be a bad structure for decision-making. In a crisis, it’s a recipe for disaster. Particularly when the person who functions as a bottleneck for all decisions becomes indecisive. And make no mistake, much of our current predicament is due to a premier who has failed to be decisive.

At his news conference Tuesday, Pallister was correct to note that just about every province in this country, and many countries around the world, are experiencing a second COVID-19 surge that meets or exceeds what they saw in the spring. However, there is one important difference between what is happening now in Manitoba and most other parts of the country.

In very general terms, most jurisdictions that suffered the worst of the first surge in COVID-19 cases are seeing far fewer deaths in the second surge. This is due mostly to the fact that these other places figured out how to be much better at protecting vulnerable segments of the population, particularly the elderly living in long-term care.

In Manitoba, we’ve gone in pretty much the opposite direction.

We’re getting a huge spike in new cases and an alarming increase in the number of deaths. That is a trend that speaks to the quality and quantity of the Pallister government’s response.

Lamentably, the premier does not seem equipped to consider the possibility that he has failed; instead, he is lashing out at anyone with the temerity to criticize his government.

In a tirade that lasted several minutes, he suggested even children know that “you don’t start blaming everybody else when you have a tough time.” But even that shameful shaming of critics paled in comparison to his cowardly attempt to shift blame to Roussin.

“We’re open to criticism always and we accept that but we have one leader over here,” Pallister said, gesturing to a silent Roussin, “and we don’t need 600,000 people pretending from the stands that they know more than he does.”

Pallister won’t admit it, but the types of decisions that have been made, and the timing, clearly reveal a political leader who is dictating major decisions to Roussin and other health-care experts. At the very least, he must share in the responsibility.

To echo the premier’s words, the last thing that Manitobans need right now is a premier who thinks he knows more than physicians when it comes to quashing a pandemic.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca

Dan Lett
Columnist

Born and raised in and around Toronto, Dan Lett came to Winnipeg in 1986, less than a year out of journalism school with a lifelong dream to be a newspaper reporter.

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