B.C. Trump-emergency bill repeats COVID lessons we ignored: Selley

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British Columbia Premier David Eby says he and his cabinet need sweeping new powers with which to be “nimble” in the face of economic threats from Washington. His NDP government’s Bill 7 would allow it to make regulations “addressing challenges” from abroad, or indeed for any purpose “supporting the economy of British Columbia and Canada.” These are things like tolling American trucks travelling through B.C. to Alaska — which Alaska is not happy about — and altering procurement rules to exclude American companies.

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On the bright side, the bill promises to eliminate all trade barriers between B.C. and the rest of Canada. On the dark side: Under Bill 7, all of this can happen with no debate in the B.C. legislature. As a result, quite rightly, reviews have been worse than mixed.

“This bill appears to be an attempt to use the threat of economic crisis to justify a cynical power grab,” Josh Dehaas, counsel for the Canadian Constitution Foundation, said in a statement. Writing at The Line, veteran B.C. correspondent Rob Shaw called it “the most extraordinary piece of legislation tabled in this province since the Second World War” — and no, not in a good way.

No other Canadian governments have proposed anything like this, but it would be foolhardy to assume they won’t sit up, take notice and perhaps cock a jealous eyebrow. And one needn’t resort to hyperbole or conspiracy to imagine where it might end. One of the ultimate inconveniences in a time of crisis is going to the polls at all, and war is a pretty common reason for delaying elections in democracies — from Ontario during the Second World War to modern-day Ukraine.

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Eby himself called this “the most consequential time for our province since the Second World War.”

We need to be so much more curious and forward-looking than we have recently been as a nation

I’m not suggesting the premier, the former head of the B.C. Civil Liberties Union, is planning some sort of coup (though my goodness, has he ever come a long way from that post!). But it’s worrisome enough he thought he could get away with Bill 7. And it speaks, I suspect, to how we handle full-blown crises in this country — which is rarely, not very well, and with a minimum of lesson-learning going on the aftermath.

The threat of Donald Trump is not much like the early-days threat of COVID-19, which landed on our heads like a sandbag five years ago this week, except inasmuch as it is brand new to everyone who’s alive right now; we have no idea what will help; and it’s stretching our basic capacities as a nation, as a federation, to the breaking point.

Hmm, actually maybe they’re more alike than I thought.

This is the main reason I keep banging the drum for further and much more intense inquiry into Canada’s pandemic response, and will continue banging that drum, until I suppose my editor takes it away from me forever: It’s not just that we need to massively improve our infection-response at every single level — from doctors’ offices to long-term care homes to border crossings — but our crisis-response in general. We are reliably struck dumb by history.

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One of the very unfortunate effects of the pandemic was how many people seemed to emerge from it supremely confident that their preferred approach had been the correct one. On the one extreme: “Canada’s death toll is much lower than the United States’, and the U.S. had far fewer and less stringent lockdowns, so lockdowns work.” On the other, “Lockdowns have been completely discredited and no Canadian politician would ever implement them again in a similar situation.”

I suspect some very basic data would surprise people at this point. Throughout most of the pandemic, our debates over which measures to implement and which not to were often poisoned by our success relative to the United States, especially, but also various European nations.

Looking back on the full scope of COVID-19, the numbers paint a somewhat more complicated portrait. At 1,538 deaths per million people, Canada is in the same basic league as Switzerland (1,647), Denmark (1,511) and Israel (1,363). Even Norway, which was keeping the death toll in check better than just about anywhere in Europe, finished at 1,204 deaths per million.

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Now consider: According to UNESCO data, Norway’s schools were fully closed for just four weeks, and Denmark’s for just eight. By June 2021, the Ontario Science Table reported at the time, schools had been closed province-wide — never mind regionally — for 19 weeks in Ontario, the most of any province. British Columbia closed schools province-wide for just nine weeks, and for most of the pandemic had the lowest death tolls and the least stringent lockdowns … but in the end, wound up with more deaths per capita than Ontario.

Why? Search me.

These things need investigating, not least as the evidence continues to mount of the harm school closures inevitably did to children — how could it not? But the urge to accept good times when they return is great. We need to be so much more curious and forward-looking than we have recently been as a nation. This is a country whose government disbanded its special Canada-U.S. relations committee, struck during Trump’s first term, because 77-year-old Joe Biden had been elected and all our troubles were presumably over.

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com

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