‘Document dump’ of thousands of pages reveals federal government’s behind-the-scenes scramble on COVID-19

OTTAWA-Is it time for the federal government to name an independent review of Canada's pandemic response?

The prime minister says no, not now, while we're still in the midst of the crisis; there'll be time for that later.

Yet, as Canada stares down the emergence of variants, warnings of a third wave and predictions that this is not the last global pandemic to come, figuring out where we went wrong and what we need to fix is a mammoth and pressing task.

It may be one that a minority Parliament - where opposition parties and the government vie to frame ballot questions for the next election, whenever it comes - is ill placed to tackle with the objectivity and impartiality required.

There's no doubt battling the COVID-19 pandemic has been a massive all-of-government and all-of-Canada effort.

It has consumed the Trudeau government in its second mandate. Yet, for all the highly scripted news conferences and announcements, the hard work and improvisation to find solutions has gone on out of the public eye.

We are just beginning to get a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes scramble.

In response to an Opposition-led production order for all records related to the public health response (and not the financial or economic supports) that passed Oct. 26 in the Commons, a massive document dump is underway.

Privy Council clerk Ian Shugart warned it could amount to potentially millions of pages."

And in the last few weeks, the paper avalanche began.

So far, more than 2,000 records comprising many thousands of pages have been released.

It's a nightmare for the House of Commons law clerk, Philippe Dufresne, who had to hire more staff and is now reviewing records for redactions for personal privacy and national security reasons. He's said his staff is only able to process about 50,000 pages a week.

Media outlets including the Star, opposition critics and researchers are poring over them to pick out news stories and discern patterns.

They don't call it a document dump for nothing.

There are hundreds upon hundreds of pages of bureaucratic, process-y, wordy and ultimately unenlightening records: useless media talking points, social media packages drafted for ministers' offices to approve, speech notes, transcripts of news conferences, power point decks of already publicly released COVID-19 modelling or outdated pandemic plans. There are duplicates, copies and emails referencing attachments that are not attached.

Those tell nobody anything worth learning.

The releases are listed by department or agency, but there is no index, no chronology, no labelling. It's not searchable. Some cannot be copied and pasted. And it so far adds up to a package that suggests a government focused less on transparency and accountability and more on deflecting critics and shoring up public confidence lest it be accused of failing in its duty to safeguard Canadian interests.

New Democrat health critic Don Davies in an interview said nevertheless the first releases are starting to reveal the depth of Canada's lack of emergency preparedness ... the state of confusion," and more troubling, he says, clear indications" of the government's attempt to conceal" if not mislead Canadians.

So what have we learned so far?

A few frankly alarming revelations that show the government was not only caught off-guard, it was overwhelmed two months after it says the Public Health Agency of Canada flagged on the first of January the worrying viral outbreak in Wuhan, China. When global demand surged in late February and March for personal protective equipment, ventilators and other medical supplies, Canada stumbled in the worldwide race for equipment in short supply.

The Public Health Agency of Canada, Health Canada, the industry and innovation department, the procurement department, the prime minister's office, all scrambled to respond, and in several instances failed.

One of the Liberal government's own MPs, Dr. Marcus Powlowski, was pressing for faster action on supplies such as ventilators, pushing colleagues with the ear of cabinet to step up faster.

I am sorry the party may be pissed off I actually talked to companies but I have reason to doubt are [sic] preparedness," he wrote on March 22 to Deputy House Leader Kirsty Duncan who is on the COVID-19 response committee. We should have moved on this over a month ago. Over the weekend nothing has happened. Sorry pandemics don t take the weekend off."

Powlowski acknowledged Friday during a filibuster at the health committee he had pushed the government to move faster, and thinks it might have helped.

The NESS was a mess:

• An April 21 email by Sabrina Kim, a PMO issues management adviser, written three days after the mass shooting in Nova Scotia, flags that the National Emergency Strategic Stockpile (the NESS) was tapped out by late April. RCMP has requested 200 goggles and 10k N95 masks to support their investigation in NS. We do not have that # of N95s in the NESS." The Canadian Armed Forces and Correctional Services Canada had also reached out to request gowns and masks. Officials said yesterday that we are two weeks out from their next shipment," she wrote.

• An undated, unsigned draft letter to members of a vaccine supply working group says the government had been working since early in the year to acquire critical vaccine administration supplies" which were currently being delivered to the National Emergency Strategic Stockpile, but noted we do not expect to have the full compliment [sic] of supplies by March 31, 2021." Health Canada has not yet replied to the Star's inquiries if that reflects the current situation or if, as the government has insisted publicly, enough syringes and other supplies will be available for the administration of vaccines in Canada.

Take these N95 masks, please.

• Thousands of suppliers across Canada offered PPE, masks, gowns and ventilators to the federal government only to be repeatedly directed to the government's procurement portal, known as Buy and Sell, which political and department staff said was how it would track all offers. But email after email shows many vendors expressed frustration about delays or failures to respond. It led to inexplicable missed opportunities.

• Ottawa rejected an offer by executives at U.S.-based Honeywell which offered to make N95 masks for Canada, potentially using their Mexican-based facility. The offer was passed on via Sarah Goldfeder, an Ottawa consultant and former U.S. embassy staffer, who cautioned that Honeywell's leaders wanted to help Canada but had multiple customers knocking down their door and was unlikely to make its offer via a web-based portal. She said, they are inundated so Canada would have to move aggressively." The eventual reply: Honeywell's masks were rejected by PHAC so we won't be proceeding."

• Not all U.S. manufacturers were willing to help Canada. Documents reveal that 3M Canada wanted to retool its Brockville plant to produce N95s and disposable masks for this country long before a deal was finally reached in August. But as early as March 17, the PMO was told that the Canadian company needed the government's assistance to make it happen. 3M America (based in Georgia) already has product lines in place to produce & ship these supplies to Canada" and didn't want to give up that business, according to a Liberal-connected lobbyist who wrote his former colleagues. Industry Minister Navdeep Bains' chief of staff Ryan Dunn wrote, We have other options for the N95 mask. We are announcing a letter of intent with Mediconn [sic] today. They are also producers of N95 masks. We will engage with 3M but the department is moving forward with the most feasible options for capacity." By March 23 the U.S. was threatening to withhold American-produced supplies for the U.S. and the same officials scrambled to lock down Canada's contracts for supply.

• By March 31, another email chain shows federal officials unwilling to chase down another lead on 3M N95 masks, with a staffer in Procurement Minister Anita Anand's office instructing a colleague to flag to the potential supplier that the US is not allowing any PPE to leave the country. I don't feel like wasting officials time on a wild-goose chase. We are already fighting to get the contracts we've already paid for to still deliver from the US."

Spin, secrecy and massaging the message

Many documents show officials' desire to fend off criticism, including when it comes to dealing with municipal, Indigenous or provincial partners, including Quebec, who demanded help to get supplies in.

But the NDP's Davies believes there were deliberate efforts to conceal or mislead. He cites a June 25 email chain where the procurement minister Anita Anand's senior political staff discuss how to withhold specifics about the supply of medical grade N95 respirator masks until the picture looked better. One staffer notes that of 23 million N95s' we have, only about 3M (3 million) are likely to end up in the health stream" because it turned out about 10 million were KN95s, a Chinese certified mask. Anand's then chief of staff Leslie Church says two more N95 shipments were on flights as we speak and through the weekend. What if we were to hold the chart until Tuesday & release it with the Min's next update? (And hope for a few more N95s in the mean time)" - which prompts Anand's communications director to quip: Crazy enough it might just work ... If journos ask where it is - we can say that SJB Day (St-Jean-Baptiste holiday) delayed some reporting - so we are holding to early next week. Which also has the benefit of being mostly true!"

Were any lessons really learned?

In December of 2020, Trudeau made his first and only specific admission of where his government made mistakes during the pandemic, telling interviewers he wished his government had acted sooner to procure PPE - masks, face shields, gowns and gloves - starting in January when the first warnings of a novel coronavirus in China emerged.

But an internal audit of the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), dated September 2020, points to many other take-aways from the first nine months of the 2020 COVID-19 response.

The lessons learned" document hails the agency for quickly mobilizing staff, but found that it was stretched beyond capacity."

The internal audit and evaluation branch says PHAC:

• did not have the breadth and depth of human resources required to support an emergency response of this never-seen-before magnitude, complexity and duration."

• had a lack of emergency response management expertise and capacity," lacked specialized" operational staff, such as quarantine officers, PPE specialists, nurses, environmental health officers and project managers, which affected the agency's border presence in the early days.

• faces critical data gaps" to better understand the impact of COVID-19 among health care workers, racialized and ethnic communities as well as Indigenous communities across Canada.

• lacked communications capacity, not just to keep up with events as they unfolded, but to support Dr. Theresa Tam, the chief public health officer, who, the audit said, worked seven days a week, and up to 20 hours a day, to prepare" and faced other considerable pressures on her office (like the need for enhanced security)."

• has serious data collection and coordination problems. The audit identified a shortage of public health expertise, including epidemiologists and analysts responsible for modelling data, as well as individuals to clean the data and conduct quality control." There is no senior lead responsible for the development of modelling data; and PHAC lacks the capacity to manage all of the data it is generating and receiving, and to build the required data collection tools and databases."

• failed to issue timely guidance to provinces and territories, with Ottawa posting new long-term-care guidelines behind provinces such as Alberta.

• faced challenges" to communicate evolving science publicly - just like during the 2009 H1N1 epidemic response. The audit notes in February 2020, PHAC wasn't recommending masks for people without COVID-19 symptoms, and only in April published its first statement that people could choose to wear non-medical masks as a way to protect others though did not explicitly recommend the measure. The audit said it was valid to point to evolving science, but there was still confusion expressed by the media and the public on this issue."

The document says a separate audit was underway into Health Canada communications and was due to be completed in October. In an emailed reply to the Star Friday, a department spokesperson said that subsequent lessons learned' exercises are underway, including on communications. As they are still underway, there are no reports available at this time."

That audit will be revealing. Communications from public officials all across Canada have been infuriating for many on the front lines of the health response, as well as those in the media.

Health Canada and PHAC have a sprawling communications roster of 340 employees, the department told the Star. Yet it routinely cannot respond to the media in a timely manner, usually taking 48 hours or up to a week to answer questions. Reporters are rarely allowed to speak directly to the department's experts. Frustrating to reporters? Sure, but who cares. What matters is it impedes timely distribution of information to the public.

Health Canada also fails to push out key public health messaging in age-, language- and culturally-appropriate ways in real time" on social media channels that could reach groups that need to be better targeted, says Dr. Isaac Bogoch, infectious disease specialist at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute and the University of Toronto.

Ottawa needs to drive behavioural change," and it needs to counter misleading and false claims that get amplified online, he said in an interview. I think we are losing the battle against misinformation." Beyond that, Bogoch said public officials at all levels in a crisis like this need to approach crisis communications with radical transparency," with the same trusted officials going out daily, answering questions.

If you don't know the answer to a question, you've got 24 hours to figure it out because you're going to be there again the next day. It's one thing to do that, it's another thing to approach it with radical transparency ... You want to build public trust? Be honest about your mistakes, own your mistakes, and correct your mistakes in real time. And that will do a tremendous service, because it's OK to be wrong."

Vaccines and information vacuums

The government appears to have started thinking about vaccines as early as Mar. 10, when the topic is scheduled on a conference call agenda. By early June, it named a vaccine advisory task force made up of medical and industry experts to recommend what vaccines in development Canada should aim to back and buy. Yet even the existence of the task force was not revealed until August, when the government unveiled its first vaccine purchase agreements - with Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna. A senior government official told the Star last week it was kept quiet so the members could do their work without a barrage of lobbying.

But Davies points to documents that show that the government was clearly worried about questions of potential conflicts of interest, especially after Dr. Gary Kobinger, director of the Infectious Disease Research Centre at the Universite Laval, resigned in September over concerns it wasn't transparent enough.

The government drafted talking points for task force members, and urged such questions be directed to the industry department's media relations office. One briefing document says that, if pressed, the government should note that, In 23 instances, a member of the Task Force declared a conflict of interest pertaining to a specific proposal, or candidate, and formally recused themselves - not participating in deliberations or the formulation of advice."

Davies is right that it was an under-reported issue in the media.

And now, the details of the seven vaccine contracts that Canada has signed are the best kept secret in town.

The federal government insists its contracts are subject to strict confidentiality clauses. A handful of other countries have released redacted versions of their contracts, but Anand told the Star last week if we were to disclose this contract, we would be in breach of contract and the vaccine suppliers could simply say to us that we are not delivering vaccines any longer."

The Opposition doesn't buy that nothing can be revealed and all three parties are now pressing at the health committee to have more transparency on the vaccine contracts.

So is the Opposition best placed to get to the bottom of it all?

Davies says only that it's an interesting question."

He says it's always a struggle for narrative" between the Opposition and the government, with the latter trying to show it did everything well and the Opposition trying to show it was a disaster.

But in a pandemic ... there's productive accountability and there's unproductive accountability in a time of crisis."

He said he's interested in drawing out information that is useful to correct the course." And, in his view, what we have seen to date is the illusion of transparency and accountability.

The government wants to postpone all accountability under the guise that any accountability right now is counter-productive, unnecessary and not timely. I don't think that's true. On the other hand, I think there are some things that are best studied in the calm of day. The truth is somewhere in the middle there."

Tonda MacCharles is an Ottawa-based reporter covering federal politics for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @tondamacc