“At the end of the day,” Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland remarked this week, “the reality of a global pandemic is that it is global.”
Three weeks ago, Health Minister Patty Hajdu made a similar argument. “A virus knows no borders,” she said.
The coronavirus pandemic is an object lesson in interconnectedness: what started as a problem in one city in China now threatens lives in every country on Earth.
Workers arrange beds in a convention centre converted into a temporary hospital in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei Province Feb. 4, 2020. (Chinatopix/The Associated Press)
But the virus also has made us newly concerned about our own borders and our own national welfare — in fact, it has pushed governments to do the sorts of things that maybe only the most wild-eyed nationalists would have dreamed of before now.
Navigating that tension poses a significant challenge to leaders, and it may keep doing that for many months or years to come.
This week’s flare-up of the nationalist-versus-globalist debate concerned the federal government’s decision to send a shipment of medical supplies to China in February.
Uncontroversial — until now
If anyone was concerned about that decision at the time, they were very quiet about it. The shipment apparently was never raised in the House of Commons. Around the same time, Chinese authorities reported that 21 other countries had donated supplies, including Germany, Britain, France and Australia.
Such aid isn’t unprecedented. In 2014, Canada sent assistance to West Africa to deal with an outbreak of Ebola.
“You’re in a war against a virus like this, you’ve got frontline troops who are fighting this thing and trying to slow and prevent its movement, you do everything possible to make sure that they’re going to be successful,” said Bruce Aylward, the Canadian epidemiologist who led the World Health Organization’s efforts in China.
“That’s how you fight these things. You fight them on the front line. You don’t keep your powder dry in something like this.”
But as reports emerge of Canadian doctors and nurses rationing personal protective equipment, critics are questioning the wisdom of sending supplies abroad.
A ripe political target
In a statement on Thursday, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer said the February shipment was “outrageous.”
The decision to send that shipment to China is an inviting political target now. But it’s not actually clear that there is any connection between what happened in February and any problems with domestic pandemic response now. If there are concerns at the local level, it has not been demonstrated that those issues can be traced to any problems at the federal level.
According to a federal government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, “the donation did not affect our preparedness efforts. Requests from provinces and territories have been coming in, and we’ve been responding to them from the National Emergency Strategic Stockpile on a case-by-case basis.”
As first reported by CTV on Thursday, the Canadian government is expecting that shipments of badly needed pandemic supplies from China to Canada — both those already received and those offered — will exceed what Canada shipped out.
Medics take care of a patient infected with the novel coronavirus upon his arrival from Italy at the University hospital in Dresden, Germany, March 26, 2020. (Matthias Rietschel/The Associated Press)
Any analysis of the sequence of events also has to consider whether the assistance provided to China ultimately improved the situation for Canada — whether that equipment helped Chinese doctors curtail what could have been an even larger outbreak there.
“By helping the initial epicentre, you’re going to help the world [and] you’re going to help Canada as well,” Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, said this week. “There’s a reciprocal concept of yes, helping China, but really, in the end, it’s preventing further spread that will also affect Canada and the rest of the world. That’s the concept.”
The isolationist impulse gets stronger
Back in February, before anyone was worrying about whether it was a mistake to send supplies to China, there were calls to ban Chinese travellers from coming to Canada. Federal officials and medical experts warned that closing the border would not prevent the virus from getting to Canada and that focusing efforts on airports and border crossings would be an inefficient use of attention and resources.
Later, as the virus spread across Europe and the United States, Canadian officials took more drastic measures. At this point, only Canadian citizens and permanent residents, or American citizens performing essential services, are permitted into this country — though even that measure may only have slowed the spread of COVID-19 in Canada.
Re-opening those borders will be a significant political challenge. Even if maintaining border restrictions is a substantial drag on the Canadian economy, new infections from foreign travellers no doubt would lead to second-guessing and calls to close the borders again.
In the meantime, Patty Hajdu said on Thursday, one of the things “this pandemic is teaching all countries is the fragility of our supply chain systems.”
“When we rely on one country or another for a particular source of goods, and that is the only country that can provide those goods or in that volume … it puts our capacity to respond in an emergency situation somewhat at a disadvantage,” she said.
What happens when this is over?
Part of the Canadian response to that problem is an extraordinary effort to create and expand domestic production of necessary supplies. Both medically and economically, that might help get Canada through this crisis — and greater domestic manufacturing capability might end up being a significant legacy of this pandemic.
But returning to a world of relatively open borders is still going to be everyone’s greater benefit.
Asked this week whether the novel coronavirus might cause more nations to turn inward and protectionist, Chrystia Freeland made the case for thinking both locally and globally.
“On one hand … in this time when we are facing real challenges to the health and safety of our own citizens, every country quite rightly needs to focus first and foremost on the health and safety of its own people,” she said.
“[But] the long term lesson we should be learning from all of this is how important international cooperation is. The lesson that we are being taught is that none of us in the world can be safe and healthy unless we are working hard to be sure everyone in the world is safe and healthy.”
As long as the novel coronavirus is circulating somewhere, it remains a threat to humans everywhere.
The challenge for leaders is to make the case that we cannot simply shut the door, hoard our own resources and hope to save ourselves.
OTTAWA – A CSIS official denies they threatened a Montreal man who was later imprisoned and allegedly tortured by authorities in Sudan.
The spy service employee, who can only be identified as Witness C to protect their identity, is testifying in Abousfian Abdelrazik’s lawsuit against the federal government.
Abdelrazik claims Canadian officials arranged for his arbitrary imprisonment, encouraged his detention by Sudanese authorities and actively obstructed his repatriation to Canada for several years.
The Sudanese-born Abdelrazik was arrested in September 2003 while in his native country to see his ailing mother.
Witness C, who had previously spoken to Abdelrazik in Montreal, travelled to Khartoum to interrogate him.
In Federal Court today, the witness acknowledged telling Abdelrazik in Canada that he should not travel, but characterized that as sincere advice to protect him rather than a threat.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 13, 2024.
VANCOUVER – A disciplinary investigation has found a former Vancouver police sergeant shared “disrespectful” commentary on a fellow officer’s court testimony about being sexually assaulted by a colleague.
The decision against Narinder Dosanjh, obtained by The Canadian Press, includes the running commentary on the woman’s testimony — apparently written by someone inside the courtroom — that calls her a “bad drunk” and says there was “no way” her case would be proved.
Former New Westminster police chief Dave Jansen, the external officer who rendered the decision against Dosanjh, says his assessment accounts for a culture of treating officers who testify against each other as “rats.”
Former Vancouver constable Jagraj Roger Berar was convicted in 2021 and sentenced to a year in jail for assaulting the woman, who can’t be identified because of a publication ban on her name.
Jansen says in his ruling, dated Oct. 11, that the comments in a Vancouver police group chat appear “supportive” of Berar and reflect “all-too-common myths” about women who make sexual assault allegations.
While Jansen found Dosanjh committed discreditable conduct by sharing the chats, a complaint against a more-senior Vancouver officer who was inside the courtroom, and who the victim and other officers believed wrote the commentary, were not substantiated.
The ruling says Jansen, who retired as New Westminster’s chief constable, would accept submissions before deciding how Dosanjh should be punished.
The woman who was assaulted was the complainant in the disciplinary investigation, and said in an interview she felt “vindicated” by Jansen’s decision because it “truly paints what I’ve been through,” after reporting a fellow officer for sexual assault.
She said many other women in municipal policing fear speaking out about ill-treatment at work, and some have told her about being assaulted and harassed but feared ruining their careers if they complained.
“This decision is important for those women to see,” she said. “It shows the tides are changing. Like, this is the first win I’ve had.”
A spokesman for the Surrey Police Service, where Dosanjh now works, did not immediately answer a question about how he was penalized, and said Dosanjh declined an interview request with The Canadian Press.
In his decision, Jansen said there was an “unfortunate but often pervasive” culture of treating officers who complain as “‘rats’, who betrayed their colleagues.”
“In terms of the messages themselves, Sergeant Dosanjh alleges that they are not degrading, humiliating or derogatory and do not attack the personal character of the complainant. I disagree,” Jansen wrote.
The decision includes a screenshot of the commentary about the complainant, who said the order of the messages appeared to refer to her evidence while she was being cross-examined and suggested the comments were written by someone listening to her testimony.
The commentary on a Vancouver police chat group on the Signal messaging app said the victim “wore a wire twice,” and “admitted in cross to possibly drinking way more alcohol than she originally claimed.”
“Her memory is super hazy and there’s no way you can prove beyond reasonable doubt,” the person wrote.
“And she admitted that she is really bad drunk,” they added.
Another message said it was a “nail in the coffin” of the case that video showed the complainant “cuddling, holding hands” with Berar.
The victim, who became aware of the commentary when a friend in the department showed them to her, was distressed by the messages and disputed their accuracy, said Jansen.
“The comments also appear to reflect some of the all-too-common myths around women making allegations of sexual assault. Some of these myths include the belief that because a victim socialized with the perpetrator, or engaged in some consensual activity with him, therefore she must have consented to the assault,” he wrote.
Jansen’s decision said Dosanjh shared the messages with a fellow officer after getting them from a “VPD chat group that he claims he knew little about, from a co-worker he claims not to be able to identify.”
The decision said other officers believed the commentary was written bya more-senior officer in the department who had been present at the trial, but Jansen said the discreditable conduct complaint against that person was unsubstantiated.
The decision said Dosanjh claimed he was the “fall guy” and “a pawn in a broader game.”
Jansen’s decision said Dosanjh was a senior officer and supervisor who was aware of the “vulnerability of victims of sexual crimes and of the myths that surround sexual assault victims.”
It said Dosanjh’s “distribution of these messages that were disrespectful of an alleged victim of sexual violence who was also a co-worker, should they become public, would likely discredit the reputation of the police force.”
The Vancouver Police Department did not immediately provide comment on Jansen’s decision.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 13, 2024.
FREDERICTON – The offspring of beetles imported from British Columbia are ready to take up the fight against an invasive insect that is killing hemlock trees in Nova Scotia.
Last fall and spring, about 5,000 Laricobius nigrinus beetles — affectionately called Lari by scientists — made an overnight journey from the West Coast.
Lucas Roscoe, research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, says in the fight against the woolly adelgid that is destroying swaths of hemlock trees in Nova Scotia, the first step was to make sure the Lari beetle can survive a Nova Scotia winter.
The one-to-two-millimetre black flying beetles were released across six sites in Nova Scotia that had the woolly adelgids.
In one of the sites, scientists placed cages of imported beetles and about 60 per cent of them were able to survive the winter in Nova Scotia, which Roscoe says is an encouraging rate.
He says the woolly adelgid was first seen in southwestern Nova Scotia in 2017 and the peppercorn-sized insect, aided by climate change, has since spread north.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 13, 2024.
