B.C. COVID-19 review won’t look at policy, Dr. Henry’s decisions

How did B.C. handle the pandemic? You can finally have your say on the province’s COVID-19 response through an online survey, but some believe the parameters of the review don’t go far enough.

British Columbians are able to tell the province how they think it has responded to the pandemic so far, but the review itself doesn’t examine B.C.’s economic and policy decisions, or the decisions made by Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry.

“I’m genuinely perplexed by it because I think it leads to suspicion,” said Canada Research Chair Heidi Tworek of the process.

The ‘COVID-19 Lessons Learned Review’ is being led by Emergency Management BC and is available online.

“This is quite strange, in a way, to have a review that is so limited and I think that does raise questions as to what are going to be the findings that come out of it,” added Tworek, who is also a UBC associate professor of History and Public Policy.

The objective, according to those behind the review, is to improve the government’s ability to respond to all kinds of future emergencies. The review will look at how the B.C. government identified the pandemic’s consequences, if its decision making was timely and well informed, and how it communicated and executed its decisions.

Tworek studies, among other things, how health policy is communicated to the public.

Throughout the pandemic, the provincial government has come under fire for many things, including some of its policies, decisions, and the way information has been shared.

“Certainly one of the major criticisms that has been made of the BCCDC and the B.C. government has been a lack of transparency. An independent review should be a time to try and address some of those questions to improve transparency, and the types of exclusions that are put into this survey may not really help to address that criticism,” she explained.

The BC Restaurant and Foodservices Association tells CityNews it has a lot of good things to say about how the province worked with its industry. However, association President and CEO Ian Tostenson agrees this survey is lacking in some respects.

“Seems to me it needs to be a little bit deeper than what’s been announced,” he said. “I actually don’t understand, I don’t know how you can do this without an economic review, a policy review on the impact the policies, how those policies were communicated. We have a lot of things to say.”

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Tworek notes the questions included in the survey are quite general. They include asking people what their “level of agreement” is for a number of statements, including how easy it has been to find provincial COVID-19 information, how clear the government’s information has been, and how quickly the province responded to each wave.

“It can sometimes be useful to add a little bit more granularity so you get further information that could be very useful, otherwise it can be hard to interpret what people are putting in the textbox,” she explained.

The survey is available in a variety of languages.

While the criteria for the project says independent groups will conduct more reviews in the future, Tworek notes this review is being done by people who have intimate knowledge of the government’s workings.

“I think it just raises the question of whether it would also be useful to bring in those who are independent of and haven’t worked for the B.C. government to really ensure that we have something that’s a fully independent review,” she added.

The survey ends on April 20 at 4 p.m. You can find it here.