From now on, it’s Stefanson’s pandemic

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/01/2022 (975 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In politics, a gaffe is when a politician accidently tells the truth.

“An election is no time to discuss serious issues,” said former prime minister Kim Campbell to widespread controversy in the middle of her epic losing 1993 election campaign. Subsequent elections in Canada have not exactly proved her wrong, with last year’s being a prime example.

Enter Premier Heather Stefanson on COVID-19 last week. “The government can’t protect everybody out there”, she intoned. “People have to learn to protect themselves. We have to learn to live with this.”

On any “gaffe-o-meter,” this inadvertent honesty rates high. Telling people in the middle of a pandemic that the government you lead cannot do anything more to protect you and your family from catching the virus is a “courageous” political statement by any measure.

Truth be told, with Omicron’s sweeping contagiousness, no government can truly protect everyone from catching COVID-19. Evidence shows that exercising personal responsibility, such as getting vaccinated and following public-health orders, remains the most potent individual antidote to the virus. If more people did so, then both personal and public-health risks would decline.

By any political measure, the premier’s statement was indecorous at best, infelicitous at worst. It may well be judged stupid. But as Forrest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Her statement needs to be judged by what’s behind it. And what’s behind it is a radical shift in the government’s pandemic management policy and the role of public health.

How do we know? Because she also said this: “At the end of the day, we’ll take advice from public health, but we will be taking advice from other Manitobans as well moving forward.” If the first statement is politically toxic, the second is politically telling. The premier has allowed that public-health advice and recommendations will be considered, but not necessarily followed.

At one level, Stefanson has simply confirmed the primacy of cabinet as the ultimate decision-maker. Nothing controversial there; that is our system of responsible government. But until her accession, it was public-health advice that directed the scope and scale of pandemic policy decisions within the government.

A structured process for developing, presenting and vetting that advice on a whole-of-government basis, first through officials and then through cabinet, always took place. Rigorous questioning of public-health data, information and recommendations should and did occur. Any adjustments would have to be approved by public health.

But ministers are also MLAs, and have a formal role in a representative democracy to bring forward discordant views from their constituents. Again, the process accommodated this, as it should, hearing those views if not always concurring with them.

Ministers may have grumbled, stakeholders may have groused, but the premier of the day insisted that deviating from expert public-health advice in the midst of a public-health emergency was neither feasible nor wise. Staying aligned with public-health advice was deemed essential to ensuring public adherence to that advice. The reaction suffered by Stefanson suggests her predecessor was correct.

For this productive and necessary dynamic to work, public-health advice must first be trusted by the government. That no longer appears to be the case. Instead, the premier has signaled that public-health policy will be what she and her cabinet says it is. It appears they have substituted, and will substitute, their judgment for that of public-health experts.

By doing so, Stefanson now “owns” the pandemic with all its consequences.

Manitoba has arrived at a uniquely clarifying moment in the province’s management of COVID-19. It has moved from actively mitigating COVID-19 transmission through new public-health restrictions to adapting to the inevitability of COVID-19 transmission, encouraged by the very lack of such new public-health measures.

“We know we cannot ease up yet on our fight against this deadly virus,” stated the government’s throne speech just before Omicron hit. If not actually hitting the brake, the premier has certainly eased her foot off the gas.

COVID-19 fatigue is endemic now, even if the virus isn’t just yet. The government has given into that fatigue. It will not impose more public-heath restrictions on people, despite announcing flagship policies to reduce surgery backlogs and keep schools open that would actually benefit from such steps. Both of those policy goals are now at risk.

Make no mistake: there is a constituency of support for the government’s new approach. But for the premier’s political opponents, her statement is an advertising gift that will keep on giving. Manitobans will have it flung in their faces more times than her party will want to count before next year’s election is done. Justifying it then will be too late. After all, elections aren’t the time to discuss serious issues, you know.

David McLaughlin was Clerk of the Executive Council in the government of Manitoba in 2020-21. He was campaign manager for the PC Party of Manitoba in the 2016 and 2019 elections.