Multiple agencies are calling on the federal government to create a new expert panel to examine the public policies made by Canadian institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic to learn how to better handle something similar in the future.
Restoring public trust in government institutions was a key element of a new report jointly authored by the Institute for Research on Public Policy’s Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation and the Institute on Governance.
The government has yet to create an official commission on it’s handling of the pandemic, the IRPP and the IOG have partnered to pressure them into doing so.
Australia and the UK have already conducted formal inquiries into their government’s pandemic response.
After hosting a two-day national conference in June 2023 in Ottawa which brought together “key decision-makers, practitioners and civil society actors closely involved in the pandemic response to share experiences and ideas on how to make Canada’s institutions more resilient for the future,” the two agencies co-authored a report on what did and didn’t work during the pandemic.
The report titled, Resilient Institutions: Learning from Canada’s COVID-19 Pandemic was published on Wednesday and it aims to “retool and reinvest in the physical and technological infrastructure of the public service that supports public services to Canadians.”
“Canada has only a fragmented, partial picture of what happened to its institutions during the pandemic. We’re recommending that a forward-looking and truly national examination be conducted by an independent panel of experts,” says IRPP president and CEO Jennifer Ditchburn.
The report gathers an analysis of senior government officials and civil society leaders from throughout Canada who shared their experiences during the pandemic and outlines four major lessons learned. It also offers 12 recommendations for how best to handle future pandemic situations.
The report recommends better communication within intergovernmental relations in terms of decision-making, particularly when it comes to incorporating risk into new policy decisions.
“The panel should hear from key players in the provinces, territories, Indigenous communities and cities to better understand how the pandemic response unfolded. They should hear from the people who worked at the community level to understand how decisions and messages filtered down to everyday lives,” added Ditchburn.
The report also recommends better communication when relaying the complexity of those decisions to Canadians who may feel uncertain about them.
“The pandemic demonstrated vividly how our public institutions and public servants can be innovative, agile and nimble, but it also exposed core weaknesses that affected government responses and public health outcomes,” said David McLaughlin, president and CEO of the Institute on Governance. “We need to learn lessons from the pandemic now, while it’s fresh, and not snap-back to traditional ways of running governments that proved inefficient and outdated.”
The report concluded that a future pandemic response can only be as good as the public institutions which dictate it, and it calls for them to “build resilience so they are ready for what comes next.”
