Pfizer brought the world some great news yesterday, but an end to the pandemic is still a long way off. Getting Canadians there quickly will require lots of intergovernmental cooperation – and that has us worried. Politics and pandemics are a lethal mix, and Jason Kenney's decision last week to reject Ottawa's COVID Alert app has politics written all over it. This tiff could be the thin edge of a much bigger wedge.
Ottawa's COVID Alert app takes a pan-Canadian approach to controlling infection; and so far eight provinces and over five million subscribers have adopted it. Alberta however has its own app and Kenney claims that it is better suited to the province's needs. There is support for this.
B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix has also raised concerns about the federal app. But while his government has yet to adopt it, Dix doesn't treat these issues as a deal breaker so much as a challenge to Ottawa to improve the app. That would be good for everyone. So, why won't Kenney play along?
The premier says that the Alberta app is essential to his government's contact tracing system and that, without it, the system will fail. This sounds reasonable enough, but let's dig a little deeper into the argument:
- First, Kenney precludes the (sensible) option of letting people use both apps. He claims that to use the federal app, the Alberta app must be turned off – and that would compromise Alberta's contact tracing system. If true, this could be significant but the experts we consulted were baffled by the premier's claim. They insisted that soundly built apps can be launched and used simultaneously.
- Second, the day before Kenney announced that he was sidelining the federal app, Alberta's Chief Medical Officer, Deena Hinshaw, reported that the province's contact tracing system had effectively collapsed from the surge in cases. Its operations have been scaled back to a list of critical groups; and it is unclear if or when the system will be able to take on the full load.
- Third, the success of apps like these requires widespread use, but so far the Alberta app has attracted only about 247,000 subscribers from a population of 4.5 million – not nearly enough to make it effective
- Finally, Kenney's assessment of the two apps fails to acknowledge the benefits that come from being part of the larger, pan-Canadian system. Travel is an obvious example. The federal app provides a way to keep tabs on people as they move in and out of the province, allowing citizens to know when travelers are infected. The Alberta app has no such capacity.