Top medical experts call for national inquiry into Canada's COVID-19 'failures'

Three and a half years after the virus behind COVID-19 began its rampage around the world — eventually killing tens of thousands of Canadians — a group of top medical experts is calling on federal officials to launch a full national inquiry into Canada's pandemic response.

In a sweeping set of editorials and analysis papers published today in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), more than a dozen physicians and health advocates are shining a spotlight on what they've dubbed the country's "major pandemic failures," from the devastation in long-term care homes, to vaccine hoarding, to higher death rates among lower-income communities. 

Those shortcomings all played out against the backdrop of the country's complex, fragmented health-care system. That decentralized approach, the authors argue, led to dramatic differences in how each province handled the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus first reported in Canada in Jan. 2020.

When compared with the "shambolic" U.K. response and the "chaos and divisiveness" of the U.S., Canada appeared to rise to the occasion when COVID hit, wrote several authors in an introductory editorial, including Dr. Jocalyn Clark, a Canadian physician who is currently the BMJ's international editor. Yet the reality, the papers explain, remains far more nuanced, with the full scope of successes and failures still unclear.

"We wouldn't know because no pandemic inquiry has been established by its federal government," the group continued. "This is a mistake."

The most important reason for an inquiry, the group stated, is accountability for the losses of the pandemic, after more than 50,000 direct deaths, millions of additional infections that "devastated families" across Canada, and a lasting legacy of Long COVID patients.

"If this global catastrophe doesn't cause the need for a deep examination… I don't know what will," Clark told CBC News on Monday.

"I hope the authorities don't just sweep it under the carpet."

Federal officials told CBC News they remain "committed to a review of the response to COVID-19 in order to take stock of lessons learned and to better inform preparations and responses to future health emergencies," according to a statement provided by the office of Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos.

Health Canada also noted there are a number of audits and studies already underway, including the launch of an independent public health review panel and a series of comprehensive audits on the agency's pandemic response undertaken by the Office of the Auditor General.

"But they're not comprehensive," Clark, from the BMJ, said in a video call with CBC News. "They almost seem to exist as a patchwork quilt."

The country's previous health minister, Patty Hajdu, spoke about the possibility of a broader approach back in 2021.

"We are open to an inquiry that is as deep as necessary, including a public inquiry, that gets to how our country can be better prepared [for] global health threats in the future," Hajdu said in April that year, adding the government would consider examining its COVID response "when the time is right."

That time is now, Clark said. "What we need is something at the federal level that's properly legislated and governed," she continued, "so that we're doing a full comprehensive public inquiry that looks at the full pandemic response."