Canada’s Pandemic Preparedness and Response: Health Equity or Health Security?

There is reason to be sceptical of the health security and emergency framings that have dominated COVID-19 responses, in Canada and globally. Many of the new health security mechanisms that have been proposed in reaction to COVID-19, with the hope that these will mitigate the impacts of future pandemics, appear poorly equipped to address the enduring, underlying drivers of health inequity—drivers that contributed to COVID-19 and that will drive future infectious disease outbreaks and emerging health issues. As Canada emerges from the height of the pandemic, it enters a world more deeply unequal and divided, with vast domestic health and income inequities and significant political polarization. The longer-term impacts of COVID-19, ranging from adverse effects of lockdowns on mental health and education, to financial precarity resulting from pandemic job loss and uneven, inflationary post-pandemic economic recovery, to a backlog of surgeries and delayed access to preventive care, will require sustained political commitment to resolve and are likely to perpetuate and amplify health inequities. Compounding COVID-19’s multiple aftereffects, new global health challenges arising from the climate crisis and other planetary threats will require new forms of global solidarity and a commitment to health equity that transcends narrowly defined sovereign nation-state interests.