Resilient Institutions: Learning from Canada’s COVID-19 Pandemic

Join us in Toronto on April 3 for a panel discussion with David Lametti, Fahad Razak, and Lori Turnbull about how to make Canada’s institutions more resilient so that they’re better able to respond to future crises.

Those surreal weeks of March 2020. The coronavirus was cutting a path of devastation around the globe and across our communities. Canada’s political leaders announced wide-scale shutdowns that affected all facets of our daily lives. We couldn’t fathom then the long-term impact the pandemic would have on our families, our businesses, on public finances and on the health care system.

Four years later, it’s worth asking: Have Canadian institutions learned anything from that traumatic roller-coaster of a crisis? Will they be ready for the next one? The short answer is an unsatisfactory “sort of.” Our governments have only a fragmented picture of what happened during the pandemic. Provinces, territories, federal departments and officials have taken their own limited snapshots of the pandemic, but that’s not enough.

Resilient Institutions: Learning from Canada’s COVID-19 Pandemic, a new report from the Institute for Research on Public Policy’s Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation and the Institute on Governance, is the first publication to look at how COVID-19 impacted public institutions across the country, with a focus on public health, the public service, federalism and democracy.

Panellists Fahad Razak (Canada Research Chair in Healthcare Data and Analytics), Lori Turnbull (professor of political science in the Faculty of Management at Dalhousie University) and David Lametti (Counsel at Fasken Martineau DuMoulin and former Minister of Justice and Attorney General) will discuss the findings of the report, and what the government can do better the next time it is confronted by a crisis.

The discussion will be moderated by Charles Breton, executive director of the Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation. It will be a hybrid event that will take place in person at the Toronto Reference Library and online via Zoom. Participation is free, though space is limited and registration is required. A reception will follow the panel discussion.