A FedEx workers scans a shipment of the Moderna COVID‑19 vaccine at Pearson International Airport in Toronto on March 24, 2021
Ours is a dumb system of pen-and-paper and Excel spreadsheets, in a world quickly heading towards smart systems of big data analytics, machine learning and blockchain. It’s unclear how Ottawa will be able to issue vaccine passports, even if it wants to. Most of the country relies on a public health system called Panorama, but not everywhere: Alberta, P.E.I., Newfoundland and Labrador, Vancouver Coastal Health, and the Public Health Agency of Canada itself all use other systems.
When SARS hit Canada in 2003, before any of this technology could actually be implemented, health authorities found themselves woefully unprepared. The federal government and province of Ontario tried to manage the epidemic relying on “an archaic DOS platform used in the late 80s that could not be adapted for SARS,” per an Ottawa-commissioned report.
The subsequent Harper government, seemingly recognizing the wisdom of what his predecessor had started, provided another $35 million more to fund the work. The contract to build this national surveillance system would ultimately go to IBM Canada. As the program struggled, the Public Health Agency of Canada—the body specifically created following SARS to help build a national public health strategy—pulled out of Panorama. It let the provinces and territories fend for themselves. Nobody was left to actually enforce those brilliant minimum standards from years earlier. It stopped being a cross-compatible national system, administered provincially, and became a smattering of incompatible systems with no real national buy-in at all.
In response to a question submitted in the House of Commons, Health Canada wrote last summer that “it is not possible for the federal government to know the details of any of the configurations of the provincial/territorial instances of Panorama in order to judge whether it meets a particular standard.” The Public Health Agency has not performed an audit of Panorama, the government added.
In the last decade, provinces have had to make do. Alberta has modernized the legacy system it reverted to when Panorama went sideways. Ontario has tried valiantly to customize and upgrade Panorama until it resembled the system the province ordered.
Quit with the false comparisons.
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