Page - 166 - in VULNERABLE - The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19

VULNERABLE166 relatively well served by having had PHAC coordinating, informing, and explaining to the public how to respond to COVID-19 as well as providing public health policy advice within government. For its part, Health Canada ultimately remains responsible for federal public health policy. COVID-19 has taken a particular toll on individuals in long-term care homes.5 Ontario now has a Minister of Long-Term Care supported by a department. Whereas in the past long-term care has been a small piece of the health care portfolio. It was only when Premier Ford last shuffled his Cabinet that he gave separate responsibility for long-term care to a junior minister. While the department has not performed particularly well since its creation, it has provided focused political attention to the issue.6 Given the significant number of deaths in long- term care facilities, it is likely that we will see this model revamped in Ontario and possibly replicated in other jurisdictions. The federal public service provides non-partisan, dispassionate, professional advice and service delivery. Some unheralded heroes have emerged in the response to COVID-19. Programmers and pro- gram delivery specialists at Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) and the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), as well as policy people in those departments and at Finance Canada, have risen to the challenge of developing new policies and programs on an almost daily basis to fill gaps in existing programs—and in record time.7 It became clear that the system for delivering employment insurance (EI), which was built in the 1970s using an outdated com- puter language, with complex qualification criteria, and usually pro- cessed fewer than 10,000 applications a week, would be ineffective at delivering employment insurance payments to the millions suddenly left unemployed by COVID-19. The government turned to the CRA to deliver the Canada Emergency Relief Benefit (CERB). Remarkably, those who qualified for EI or the CERB received their benefits from Service Canada within a few weeks. This achievement is all the more remarkable given that most public servants were working from home as part of an organization not structured to do so. 5. See Colleen M Flood, Bryan Thomas & Kumanan Wilson, this volume, Chapter C-1. 6. “Long-Term Care COVID-19 Tracker”, online: National  Institute  on  Ageing <ltc- covid19-tracker.ca/>. 7. Nick Taylor-Vaisey, “Pulling off a Bureaucratic Miracle: How the CERB Got Done”, Maclean’s (4 May 2020), online: <www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/pulling-off- a-bureaucratic-miracle-how-the-cerb-got-done/>.