Juno News - What would Canada do if something much worse than COVID-19 happened？

00:00:00.000 One thing I keep thinking is that Canada's response to the coronavirus does not bode well

00:00:12.260 should we have a black swan event that is much worse than this virus has proven to be. You know,

00:00:18.500 early on when this virus first hit Wuhan, we had no idea what we were dealing with. There were

00:00:23.120 worries that this thing would have a really big fatality rate. This could be like a pandemic

00:00:27.540 never seen before in history. Who knew? Lots of question marks, lots of concerns. Thankfully,

00:00:32.420 we've learned a lot since then. Obviously, treatments have developed. You've got the

00:00:36.160 vaccines now. And we've just learned that the fatality rate is thankfully not as high as it

00:00:40.620 could have been. Not as high as we first feared. However, we really haven't necessarily adjusted

00:00:46.280 our expectations, our responses, our attitude towards lockdowns commensurate with all of that.

00:00:52.200 I mean, I think we've really failed to rise to the occasion on so many levels, to have a

00:00:57.300 properly proportional response in terms of how our politicians, our public health officials,

00:01:03.660 media, how the general public narrative is evolving or not evolving. Lots of concerns

00:01:09.360 around all of that. And the question is, what happens next? Now, every bad situation, every

00:01:14.300 disaster is going to unfold in different ways, in unique ways. So you can't say that the coronavirus

00:01:19.620 situation is indicative of what's going to happen later. But I still can't help but wonder if we had

00:01:25.020 a black swan event, which is an unlikely but serious event, an event that nobody really

00:01:31.160 expected, nobody really planned for, and we were really caught fleet-footed by it. How do you respond

00:01:36.540 to it? Now, these things vary in what they are, black swan events. Well, 9-11 has been described as one.

00:01:42.440 I wrote a book called Pulse Attack, which actually strives to separate the fact and fiction, break down the

00:01:47.860 possibility, probability of what happens if the whole electrical grid across, say, North America

00:01:53.060 collapses. How do you get it back up? How do you deal with it? This could happen through naturally

00:01:58.880 occurring phenomenon, concerns about solar flares. The probability is very, very minor, but the

00:02:04.520 possibility still exists, and through terror attack and so forth, what does one do if the electricity

00:02:09.580 grid goes down for a prolonged period of time, for weeks, for months? And I watch what we've done

00:02:15.080 during coronavirus, and one of the biggest concerns that a lot of people have been frustrated with

00:02:20.280 is there were actually government plans and protocols in place for how you respond to a

00:02:25.620 pandemic. There's the federal one, Dr. Theresa Tam signed off on the latest edition just in 2018.

00:02:31.320 There are provincial ones, there are even regional ones for separate public health regions all across

00:02:36.200 Canada. The plans are very interesting ones. They actually all presuppose that coronavirus, well,

00:02:41.360 whatever pandemic materializes, will be worse than what we're currently experiencing in terms of the

00:02:46.060 number of people who get sick with it, the volume of people who die of it, and so forth. But they also

00:02:50.880 suggest a much more targeted approach. They do not recommend broad-based lockdowns. And one looks at this

00:02:56.020 plan and goes, wow, I feel like if we'd actually stuck to the plan, we'd be in a lot better situation

00:03:01.360 than we are in now. We have all these other potential negative events, all these catastrophes,

00:03:08.320 disasters that are we even really planning for them? Are we really attuned to them? Even if we do plan for

00:03:14.020 them, would we actually follow the plans? And, well, I wish I could say something positive at the end of

00:03:19.000 all this, but I don't have too much positive to say. It's really worrisome about what about the next

00:03:25.180 time something hits the fan? How will we respond? And I think we've got to talk about that a bit more.

Juno News - May 25, 2021