It’s weird that Canada never had a COVID-19 inquiry

Halina Bennet’s observation that most people can’t really stomach pop culture depictions of the COVID-19 pandemic got me thinking about my country’s curious lack of reckoning to this generation-defining crisis. As I wrote a few days ago:

That being said, I don’t think we should be complacent about the overall risk of a pandemic as bad as or worse than COVID-19 in the coming years and decades. Our biomedical tools (e.g., mRNA vaccines) may be sharper than ever, but as a society we have not done nearly enough to grapple with our response to the last pandemic. Instead of confronting our failures directly, we have largely chosen to move on. My fear is that our civilizational capacity to respond to another global pandemic has been badly depleted.

Canada has not had any kind of national public inquiry for the COVID-19 pandemic, despite repeated calls for one. Canada is hardly unique in this respect. The United States also never had a public inquiry, even as backlash to public health measures helped usher in a new generation of political and health leadership. There was a United States House COVID Subcommittee, but this was a partisan-led congressional investigation, not an independent inquiry. Canada has not even had the equivalent of that, such as a national parliamentary investigation of comparable scale.

This silence is doubly strange because there is a direct Canadian precedent, albeit a provincial one. After the 2003 SARS outbreak, the Government of Ontario established the SARS Commission, chaired by Justice Archie Campbell, as an independent inquiry into how the virus was introduced, spread, and dealt with. The death toll from SARS in Canada numbered in the dozens. The death toll from COVID-19 numbered in the tens of thousands. And yet the smaller disaster was the one to produce an institutional reckoning.

If we refuse to reckon with what we did right and what we did wrong during this public health crisis, we should not be surprised when fewer citizens answer the next time we ask them to sacrifice for the good of their neighbours.