Mark Carney gives Canada low marks for pandemic preparedness, A+ for benefit spending

The Canadian government wasill-prepared when the COVID-19 pandemic struck,with dwindling stockpiles of personal protective equipment and a lack of domestic vaccine manufacturing capacity but it took the right approach by spending generously on income supports,says former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney.

Carney offered that assessment of Canada's pandemic response in a wide-ranging interview airing Sunday on CBC's Rosemary Barton Live.

"We weren't prepared in terms of PPE stockpiles. We weren't prepared in terms of vaccine capacity," Carney told host Rosemary Barton. "We're living with the consequences of that."

Carney said the scrambleto procure PPE for health care workers and the general population in the early months of the pandemic left Canada at the mercy of global supply chains that were unstable because of soaring demand.

A similar dynamic is playingout now as the country waits for vaccines to be delivered from a small group of foreign manufacturers vaccines itlacks the ability to produceat home.

"It's hard to rely on the global system ... I think we've learned a lesson from that," said Carney.

WATCH |Carneyhopes pandemic urgency carries over to tackling climate change:

Carney hopes pandemic urgency carries over to tackling climate change

4 years ago

Duration 7:31

In an interview with CBC's Chief Political Correspondent Rosemary Barton, economist Mark Carney says society can't self-isolate from climate change and wants to be part of channeling the financial sector toward making innovative, sustainable investments.

Crisis banker

Carney is no stranger to global crises, having been a central banker through three of them. He served as Bank of Canada governor during the 2007-2008 financial crisis and the subsequent European debt crisis, and as governor of the Bank of England as that country negotiated its rocky exit from the European Union.

The former Goldman Sachs investment banker compared the global response to COVID-19 to that of the 2008 crisis, which he said caught most countries off guard.

"Resilience will come from Canadians, will come from our own domestic capacity," said Carney."We were resilient [10-12] years ago in the financial sector because we had built that capacity in Canada and we had a huge wave of shocks coming from the U.S., from Europe, but our capacity in Canada meant that we were able to do it.

"That's that's what we will need on the health side."

Carney said the Liberalgovernmentmade the right decision to spend big on pandemic benefit programs like the Canada emergency response benefit (CERB) and the federal wage subsidy. He echoed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau'smessage that these programs were meant to act as a bridge to better times while the economy shuts down for health reasons.

"I'm not going to quibble about exact orders of magnitude or targeting or all that broad brush. It's the right thing to do," said Carney, who acted as an informal adviser to Trudeau on the federal government's response to COVID-19 in the early stages of the pandemic.

In a new book being released next week called Value(s): Building a Better World for All, Carney argues that,going forward, Canada and other countries will need to bring emergency spendingwhich has soared to historic levels back into balance with regular government spending.

He alsoargues that governments need to make major investments in physical anddigital infrastructure, climate-related initiatives and human capital in order to build a more sustainable and equitable world.

"We've lived through a decadein a year at least, if not more than a decadein terms of digitization, different types of jobs," Carney told Barton."We want to retool so the Canadians can take the biggest advantage of that."

You can watch full episodes of Rosemary Barton Live onCBC Gem, the CBC's streaming service.