Bob Dylan sang that the darkest hour is right before the dawn.
My experience in government taught me that there is a lot of truth in that. Every crisis is also an opportunity. Sometimes you need fear, trauma, anxiety and anger of the kind that many Canadians are feeling over the H1N1 vaccine lineups if you want to change the system. Let me tell you- I haven’t seen an issue grab the public’s attention like this in a long time.
It’s obvious to all those who have followed the Health portfolio over the last 20 years that the federal, provincial, territorial structure of delivering health and safety services isn’t working very well. Hep C, SARS, Listeria and now H1N1 have repeatedly shown that multiple levels of government being involved in the delivery of services makes delivering those services more of challenge. It’s been a challenge for a long time and an area crying out for co-ordination and simplification. But of course it would require constitutional change, and no one in their right mind wants to take that on. Right?
But, rarely are there such opportunities as the current public frustration with the H1N1 vaccine presents.
For example: debate within government swirled for years about the need to spend significant dollars to digitize criminal justice records. Then the public learned that Paul Bernardo might not have had the chance to murder Kristin French and Leslie Mahaffey had Scarborough and St. Catherine’s police been able to share information better through an electronic system. Often, in public administration and politics, you need terrible situations to steel leaders to act.
Some will say government overspent, but without September 11th, 2001 Canada would never have made the investments in transportation security and security intelligence that we needed to.
I sincerely hope that Canada’s political leadership grabs this opportunity to have an honest discussion with Canadians about what needs to change to make the system work better. But, being a realist, I’m next to certain they won’t.
That’s not meant to be overly critical of the current government, who have actually worked hard to plan for this issue. It’s more a statemment of the enormity of the challenge. While it’s easy to write a blog posting about what should happen, if I worked in PMO or OLO I’m not certain I’d have the guts to run to the leader to propose a round of constitutional talks on health. It’s the basis of the provinces taxing authority and a pandora’s box on a number of fronts.
Perhaps it will have to wait for a darker hour to come, months or years down the road.
