I’m perfectly happy to sound like a broken record on this. For nearly a year I’ve been writing that when it comes to massive system shocks like COVID-19, there can be no lessons learned if nobody decides to learn lessons. And if that work is not done in public, I see no reason to assume it’s being done.
This week I’m pleased to have company.
As I wrote last June, two think tanks had a conference in Ottawa to discuss what we might call governance lessons from the COVID pandemic. My first post on the conference was here; the second was here. (I kept up the pressure in later posts, here and here. Like I say, broken record.) Now the report from that conference is out. The headline on the website of the Institute for Research on Public Policy, one of the conference’s organizers, states its main conclusion plainly: “Federal government should appoint expert panel to study what happened during COVID-19 pandemic, says major new report.” Here’s the report page. And here’s the corresponding page on the website of the other organizer, the Institute on Governance.
One of the first things these people noticed is that just about everyone they contacted to participate in the conference told them there’s a need for an ambitious, multilevel, holistic examination of governments’ response to this major shock. And indeed they didn’t really think this work should be left to two think tanks, though at least the conference was a decent stopgap until the feds put on their big pants.
