Rishi Maharaj: How B.C. botched the third wave

If there is any daylight between the B.C. NDP’s approach to government in the midst of a pandemic and that of the Ontario PCs or Alberta UPC, I can’t see it.

By: Rishi Maharaj

As the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the globe in March 2020, Canadian provinces and territories quickly split into two groups. The four Atlantic provinces and three northern territories pursued an elimination strategy, largely sealing their borders and aggressively suppressing any clusters of community transmission. The rest of Canada adopted a reactive approach we came to know as “bending the curve” — focused on protecting the healthcare system from being overwhelmed. 

The latter approach also came to be associated with mass carnage in long-term care homes, particularly in Ontario and Quebec, as community transmission inevitably made its way to the most vulnerable. By the end of the first wave in spring 2020, the Canadian Institute for Health Information reported that LTC facilities and retirement homes accounted for 80 per cent of all COVID-19 deaths in Canada, far above the international average.

One large province, however, stood somewhat apart. British Columbia had acted swiftly to impose a public-health order barring long-term-care workers from working at multiple facilities. B.C. would come through the first wave of the pandemic largely unscathed, with a death total that was a fraction not just of its Canadian peers, but all jurisdictions of comparable size globally. 

As the first wave subsided, B.C. was seen as a model case for the world, one of the only success stories to come out of Canada during the first wave. Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry was profiled in the New York Times as “The Top Doctor Who Aced the Coronavirus Test.” A designer shoe and a mural in Gastown honoured her. All this at a time when our cousins to the east were learning ghastly details of their provinces’ long-term care homes from soldiers who’d been sent in to help.

When the successes and failures of the first wave were tallied, it was easy to draw a contrast between governments who acted quickly and decisively to stamp out the virus — New Zealand, Taiwan and Australia among them — and those who adopted a more laissez faire approach which first downplayed the risks then acted too slowly and half-heartedly to quell them.

If you were keeping score on which Canadian political parties had fallen on the less-deadly side of that divide, B.C. and its New Democrat government seemed to have passed a test that right-of-centre counterparts in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec had all flunked.

Pandemic response is a collective-action problem, the narrative goes, and a singularly important moment for government intervention. Conservatives who pooh-pooh the effectiveness of government at the best of times had wound up sabotaging its effectiveness at the worst of times. Jason Kenney and Doug Ford were taken to task for their reliance on “personal responsibility” instead of concrete policy measures to contain the virus, and rightly so. B.C. and its NDP government was the perfect counterpoint, showing what could be done by a government that believed in its own role.

Flash forward to today. British Columbia is home to the largest outbreak of the P1 variant, which is both more likely to cause severe illness and more transmissible. Ground zero for that outbreak is the resort town of Whistler, which remained open throughout the winter even as B.C. grappled with the worst of the second wave. The seven-day average of new daily cases in B.C. is now around 20 per 100,000 population — the same trajectory as Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan and above Quebec. And we’ve learned that B.C.’s first wave success may not have been all that we thought: its rate of excess deaths in 2020 was about six times the number of reported deaths from COVID-19.

What went wrong? As the second wave crested around the Christmas holidays, the regular press conferences of Dr. Bonnie Henry and Health Minister Adrian Dix increasingly featured pleas to “dig deeper” and “do more,” but little in the way of concrete policy actions to limit the spread of the virus. Travel around the province remained functionally unrestricted and anyone from anywhere could book a holiday in Whistler — and they did. By January, frontline physicians in the tiny resort town were raising the alarm on how many out-of-province patients they were seeing.

As cases spiralled, the B.C. government’s messaging continuously stressed that social gatherings and personal behaviour were the problems while lacking any policies that could curb transmission and strenuously denying that schools or workplaces could be sources of it despite ample data and research from other jurisdictions showing exactly that. 

Rather than taking an expansive view of the government's role in combating the virus, Premier John Horgan repeatedly dismissed travel restrictions as unconstitutional and impractical, embarrassingly quipping that “Manitoba has only four roads in and out of it.” On March 29, Horgan doubled down on the rhetoric and blasted young people for “blowing it for the rest of us.”

Yet B.C., like all other Canadian provinces, has failed to enact paid sick leave to protect workplaces from infected workers turning up out of economic necessity. And Whistler’s dire situation was seeded in part by congregate housing where many workers share a kitchen and bathroom — the only type of housing that a young person without a trust fund could hope to afford there. 

If there is any daylight between the B.C. NDP’s approach to government in the midst of a pandemic and that of the Ontario PCs or Alberta UPC, I can’t see it. After calling a snap election on the premise of needing a mandate for an ambitious new agenda, the Horgan government’s signature policy turned out to be cutting one-time $500 cheques to everyone. 

There is a divide between governments that delivered decisive action and those that plod along behind with half-measures, and Canadian governments of all political stripes have consistently fallen on the wrong side of it. The gap in Canada is not between left-wing and right-wing conceptions of government. Our problem is that regardless of political affiliation, our leaders have never fully committed themselves to beating this virus. Those leaders believe that the pandemic will be over one day, because of someone, somewhere — but not them. Even the governments that are ideologically attuned to collective action have failed to put it into practice.

“Better is always possible,” you see, just don’t expect the government to be the one delivering it. That’s on you, and don’t blow it.

Rishi Maharaj is an electrical engineer. He lives in Powell River, B.C.

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