Paul Bennett: Quick response, spotty follow-through from education authorities | Telegraph Journal

Auditor General Paul Martin’s December 2023 audit report on provincial management of the COVID-19 crisis provided some absolutely fascinating insights. Watching the Dec. 14 delivery of the report, reading the performance audit, and observing the public accounts committee hearings, the hedgehog concept popped back into my head. Author Jim Collins got it half-right in his 2001 international best seller, Good to Great.

Foxes seem to know something about everything, while hedgehogs seem to know everything about something in particular – much like the proverbial ‘one-trick pony.’ While hedgehogs have the capacity to change trend lines and power-though bumps in the road, they can also begin to imitate ostriches in times of crisis. Traumatic shock with massive disruption can disrupt ‘path dependency’ and it’s more comfortable to bury your head in the sand and, in rare cases, even misplace the recovery plans.

Martin revealed the lead department charting the course, health, could not produce evidence it used to justify dozens of big COVID-19 decisions, didn’t adjust targets as the pandemic evolved, and didn’t monitor the outcomes of its key performance metrics. That, it now appears, had a cascading effect on two other government departments, health, education and early childhood development, and justice and public safety.

My hedgehog analogy seems to fit and so I checked it out with Canada’s leading emergency response guru, Allan Bonner, a Toronto-based, razor-sharp consultant who knows the province well, going back to his university days at UNB. He’s heard the hedgehog versus fox metaphor a hundred times before, and he liked me taking poetic license in attempting to graft on the ostrich. Not to be outdone, he wondered if the institutional response was more that of worker bees blocking out a storm or ants caught in a spider web trap.

If anyone can make any sense out of the N.B. government’s response to the pandemic crisis it would be Bonner, senior author of the thickest book on the subject, EMERGENCY! Quarantine, Evacuation and Back Again (2022), bearing the imprint of Passamaquody Press and published in St. Andrews, N.B.

While the auditor general identified the lack of “evidence-based” decision-making, Bonner was more inclined to cut provincial policy-makers some slack. “Most of the world’s major cities still have emergency plans that make no reference to pandemic planning and rely on fantasy assumptions,” so it’s part of a broader problem.

“In the midst of a global disaster,” Bonner told me in an interview, “my guess is that they did not spend much time reviewing peer-reviewed academic papers on emergency response planning.

“There is a fog of battle in the midst of a crisis,” he added, “and it applies here during the pandemic.”

N.B.’s education department, headed by its fast-moving, fox-like minister, Dominic Cardy, got off rather lightly in the AG’s report. It was quick out of the gate and “responded effectively to the COVID-19 pandemic by continuing to provide public education and protecting the health and safety of students.” The hedgehogs did their work because the government’s pandemic directives “were up to date and consistent with direction that was provided by the department based on guidance provided by Public Health, and public safety.”

So far, so good, but – upon closer scrutiny – it may not have altered the usual coping mechanisms and ingrained organizational behaviour. The education department, Martin reported, did not ensure updated pandemic plans were in place prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, emergency management training was provided to staff, nor provide consistent training for teachers to move to virtual learning. It was, Martin found, mostly “ad hoc” with “no centralized co-ordination or oversight by the department; thus, no way for them to know how well things were going or where the gaps were.”

None of this surprised Bonner. Closing New Brunswick schools for 17 weeks, following the dictates of public health, had unintended consequences. “The school closures were not well thought-out,” he pointed out, “and that’s happened before.” Many opportunities to be creative with alternative facilities were missed, according to Bonner, when shutdowns applied to all schools irrespective of size, location, or student composition.

Universal, symmetrical approaches are ingrained in provincial and district educational mindsets. It’s hard, Bonner learned, working with a GTA school board, to break out of the so-called “path dependency” and tailor responses to local community needs. “What’s good for the rural school in McAdam,” he notes, “simply won’t work in a comprehensive school the size of Fredericton High School.”

Communities outside the mainstream experienced the worst of the pandemic. That critical point was driven home by Chief Hugh Akagi in his chapter in the EMERGENCY! book. While elderly people died in isolation in long-term care homes, he reminded us, children were “suffering developmentally and emotionally because they couldn’t go to school” and mental health issues were evident in “isolation and loneliness among people of all ages.” In his view, we missed an opportunity to invest in communities to ensure “a better, sustainable, and more peaceful society.”

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