THE THIN WHITE LINE: the history of a future avian influenza pandemic

Chapter 2: State of Emergency

Interview with Hon. Todd Pickford, Minister of Health and Wellness of Alberta

EDMONTON, ALBERTA

[The Hon. Todd Pickford, now serving his third term as Member of the Legislative Assembly for Banff-Cochrane, has been Alberta’s Minister of Health and Wellness since 2011.]

    Nice handshake. Just a few months ago, even a simple handshake was virtually against the law. Did you know that during the Spanish Flu pandemic about a hundred years ago, a health inspector in San Francisco shot a guy for refusing to wear a mask?
    These days, it’s the politicians who get shot. Sorry about the security hassle getting in here, but some lunatic took a shot at me three days ago. Some guy who said the government killed his daughter. Said we didn’t do enough.
    Put this in your book: At the beginning of the crisis, we knew little more than your average Joe, and when we knew something as a fact, we did everything we could to act on it. Of course, we knew about China, that the superflu was on its way here. Even though it happened much faster than we expected, we thought we were ready. But all those pandemic plans look great on paper until you actually try to coordinate such a massive effort.
    Good Lord, first there were the teleconferences. These sometimes involved hundreds of people from local, provincial and national levels of government. On a given call you might have the WHO, the CDC, the NML, the RHAs, Health Canada, Canadian Integrated Public Health Surveillance, Network for Health Surveillance, First Nationals and Inuit Health Branch, Canadian Red Cross, FluWatch, Viral Watch, Center for Emergency Preparedness and Response, Laboratory Center for Disease Control, and Canadian Response Laboratory Team——to name a few, everybody with their own agendas and wanting to put their two cents in. For the first, it took about half an hour just to get about a hundred people on the phone, and then once we started, everybody spent 30 minutes just exchanging cell numbers and email addresses. It took us two days just to get set up to make decisions and work out who was in charge of what.
    Then there was the endless debate over what to do about the epidemic. The thing to understand here is that we didn’t know much and we wanted to be damn sure of the facts if were going to start phasing the province into a virtual economic standstill while suspending rights that most people take for granted. But it was difficult just to get the go-ahead to do anything, even the first common-sense steps we took such as starting the PSA campaigns and shutting down the schools and hockey rinks. We claimed the emergency powers but nobody wanted to be hasty; they wanted to wait and see how things developed. The problem was by the time you got solid information and acted on it appropriately, it was already dated and the situation on the ground had already gotten much worse. Even though a crisis was developing under our noses, you had the same old egos, agendas, turfs. Government got much more decisive over time. God bless democracy——it takes forever to get moving, but once it does, it can get things done.
    You know, the guy who took a shot at me is a car mechanic. A car mechanic! When car mechanics start taking shots at you, maybe it’s time to retire from politics and let younger men give it a try. Frankly, I’m tired of it.
    But let me say this: You can blame the government all you want for “failing” to stop the epidemic, but the fact was we did what we could with what we had and there sure as heck is no such thing as a perfect response in such a situation, even though we were acting upon pandemic response plans developed by the country’s leading public health experts. The bottom line is that once you’ve got superflu in your borders, you can’t stop anything. All you can do is mitigate, which involves purposefully screwing up people’s lives and livelihoods based on what you think might be happening at the time. For a politician, this is a no-win situation. If anybody has a better idea on what to do next time, let us know. We’d love to hear it.
    You know, a hundred years or so ago, during the Spanish Flu pandemic, things were different. There was no nanny state. These days, people expect government to solve all their problems. We were all warned; heck, the World Health people practically screamed at us for years. But hardly anybody took it seriously. They went about their lives and spent their money on vacations instead of thinking ahead and preparing for emergencies, believing the government would take care of it when it happened. I had hoped people would have learned something after what we all went through——that government can do good things but can’t do everything, and that they have to step up to the plate and help themselves and each other. But now car mechanics are shooting at MLAs like it’s our fault the pandemic happened and caused all those people to die.
    The fact is we’re actually doing good right now, all things considered. Although we are busy preparing for a possible second wave, despite all the problems——with food production and distribution, the economy in a shambles, the insurance and airline industries bankrupt, global trade coming back at a trickle——we’re slowly making progress and getting back to normal. Our emergency powers recently expired. The schools reopened three weeks ago. The black market is disappearing as store shelves fill up again. And most important, we’re experienced at this now. People are starting to feel optimistic. At least it’s not like it is down in the U.S., with their hyperinflation and continued disruption, and where some parts of the country are still under martial law. And let’s not even compare to what’s still going on in China.
    We did everything we could, and history will judge whether we did right or wrong. If people don’t like the job we did, I hope they’ll keep their heads and let us know how they feel——at the ballot box.