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Centre of Excellence Event

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

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.

On Wednesday, April 3 in Toronto we had a conversation about how to make Canada’s institutions more resilient so that they’re better able to respond to future crises. Panellists David Lametti (Counsel at Fasken Martineau DuMoulin and former Minister of Justice and Attorney General), Fahad Razak (Canada Research Chair in Healthcare Data and Analytics), and Lori Turnbull (professor of political science in the Faculty of Management at Dalhousie University) discussed the findings of the report, and what the government can do better the next time it is confronted by a crisis.

The discussion was moderated by Charles Breton, executive director of the Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation. It was a hybrid event that took place in person at the Toronto Reference Library and online via Zoom.

Video

PANELLISTS

MODERATOR

Date and time
April  3, 2024
5:00 p.m. (4:30 p.m. for in-person registration)
Location
Toronto Reference Library, Appel Salon, 789 Yonge Street, Toronto, ON M4W 2G8
Event Type
Panel Discussion
Registration
Free (please note that the below link is for in-person registration; see event description for webinar registration link)
Registration is closed