I'll keep saying this: Competency does not scale in line with challenges
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I'll keep saying this: Competency does not scale in line with challenges
We have a mediocre government in normal times, and it failed us — predictably! — during an emergency. But, still. I'm hopeful.
I’m not sure about the rest of you, but where I live, here in the centre of the universe, the arrival of actual spring weather took a while. It’s been cold until just the last few days. The forecast for the weeks ahead looks amazing, and thank God for that. We could all use some time outside.
I’m sorry I did not send an update last Friday. I was covering the testimony of Katie Telford, the PM's chief of staff, and after I filed my column a week ago, I just didn’t have any gas left in the tank. This week was still busy, and God knows there’s a ton happening in the news right now. I didn’t want to miss another week.
I’m feeling optimistic. I haven’t been of late. I have found the third wave in Ontario more exhausting than the first two. I think I held it together pretty well the first few rounds with this damn virus, but the third wave, which we easily could’ve avoided, deeply frustrated me. I’m normally a bit of a Vulcan. I’m not big on human emotion. But I’ve had a seething, low-level anger for a month or two. We did not have to do as badly as we did. Ontario's third wave wasn't inevitable, at least not at this scale. This was a leadership failure. This failure is measured obviously in human lives and suffering, but also in economic damage and further disruption everything. We could’ve done better than this. We didn’t.
I have a few big-picture column ideas rattling around in my head, ways of wrapping all this up and putting a bit of a bow on it. (At least until the historians get to work on it.) I think it is very hard for us to look around at how we have handled this pandemic and conclude many good things about our governments.
To be honest with you all, as I said two weeks ago, I’ve always assumed a degree of baseline incompetence among our government officials. I'm not a reflexive bureaucrat basher, but we don’t live in a country that excels at delivering basically anything on time or on budget. In general, I think in Canada, your government will do a reasonably good job delivering the services and projects it already oversees, basically due to institutional muscle memory, though probably at a bloated cost.
I have absolutely no faith, generally speaking, in our ability to do anything new.
This was the main theme of my note two weeks ago. So I won’t repeat it all here. I’ll repeat something else instead! Some of you might remember a few months ago when I wrote a column here about pistols for the military. It’s a small example of the dysfunction that I’m talking about — dysfunction not only of process and outcome, but also of outright concept. Our incompetence isn’t always accidental. We set out to do it!
What happened was that a few years ago, both the Canadian Armed Forces and the British military realized within a few months of each other that they both needed to replace their standard-issue sidearms. Both militaries concluded that they needed 25,000 of them. A standard sidearm is not a complicated piece of equipment! Basically any modern semi-automatic 9 mm pistol will do, and there’s a ton of options we could just pick off the shelf. The British pulled it off in two years, for $15 million. That’s how long it took them to go from, “Hey, we need 25,000 new pistols,” to issuing the new pistols to field units.
In Canada, meanwhile, having decided that we also needed 25,000 new pistols, we set out a 10-year project timeline and budgeted for $50 million. Apparently, in Canada, we literally assume from the outset that we need to take five times as long and spend three times as much to do what the British did. Being slow and inefficient is actually baked into our process!
This is a small example, but I think it speaks to a very widespread problem in this country. We have very low expectations for our government, and our governments consistently meet those low expectations. Canadian politicians and government officials are not held to a high standard of performance during routine operations, and did not rise to the occasion during a crisis. I've made this point many times before, and I'm going to keep making it: competence does not scale up in proportion to the size of the challenge. If you are mediocre at handling small, routine tasks, you are generally not going to be good at handling big, novel ones.
I’m not ready to write these pieces yet. Because, like I said, I’m actually feeling optimistic. I think our vaccine campaign is going to go better than we think. In fact, it’s already going better than we think. I was recently vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine at a clinic in Toronto that opened itself up to all comers because local needs were being met. You’re hearing more and more of this. There are more and more people who are eligible to get vaccinated in Ontario all the time, and there are still clinics that are able to take on even more people. In a Twitter thread on Friday, I laid out my rough mental math on this. I think we will complete the first-dose campaign in approximately 30 days, and be working on second doses through the summer. By the fall, so long as supply holds up (which is an assumption, but I hope not a reckless one), we will be able to get eligible children done and finally beat this pandemic.
That’s the optimism.
But the part where I’m not optimistic? All the stuff I referred to above. We have real problems in this country that we need to be focusing on fixing. But fixing the problems will require a degree of discipline and competency that I'm not sure we have. We might be too broken to fix ourselves. COVID-19 was a serious challenge, but it was actually a fairly low-risk virus. This is something that a more competent government response could have handled very effectively, and did, in other parts of the world. We can’t assume all future disasters will also be fairly low-impact, and we certainly can’t assume it will be true of the next pandemic. This was a test we could have passed. We flunked.
So I’m thinking a lot about that. There’s a few columns in that general realm that I'm mulling over now. I guess sooner or later I’ll get around to writing them. But in the meantime, it’s beautiful out, and I’m gonna go outside and have a beer. I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
Oh, wait, one more thing: two weeks ago I had sought your feedback on using a Twitter thread as my actual repository of my weekly work. I had a very positive reaction to that, but I was asked to make explicitly clear to those who do not use Twitter that in order to see the thread, you have to click the tweet above. Or this link here. That will take you to the thread, and you can scroll down. Thank you very much for all the feedback and the many kind words. It really does mean a lot to hear from you, even if I'm lousy at responding in a timely way.
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