What's good about Canada?  These days, I'm inclined to say very little.  The country as a whole has failed to protect people from the pandemic, and that's because of the way this country was built.

In B.C., the Brazilian variant was allowed to get completely out of control, mostly so the Whistler ski resorts could stay open.  Alberta currently has the highest proportion of active COVID cases, somehow outpacing Ontario where ICU's are a gentle breeze away from total collapse.  In Quebec, the social contract over lockdowns and curfews is cracking after the city of Montreal had its curfew moved up with essentially no evidence it would stem the rising tide of infections, beyond the feeling in the premier's gut that curfews work.

More than a year into the pandemic, huge workplaces that are one of the primary drivers of infection are allowed to stay open until they too have out-of-control outbreaks.  Just this week, a Cargill meat packing plant in London, Ont. closed only after 82 workers became infected.

There have been federal failures, too.  In January 2020 Health Minister Patty Hajdu said "The risk is low to Canadians."  A week later the WHO declared a global health emergency.  March break went ahead, cases flowed in, and the feds dithered to the point that cities and provinces had to send their own public health people to airports to give incoming travellers isolation guidance.

Those are pretty big failures.  Their ability to keep the variants from getting into the country have also failed.

But the thing is, from the very beginning we had premiers telling us that the federal government was failing.  What we haven't seen with any effectiveness is them mitigate those failures.

That is, at least, anywhere west of the Atlantic provinces.  There we can see what an effect proactive and serious provincial action can have in making up for the failures of the feds.  There, travel restrictions between other provinces, and sometimes between the "Atlantic bubble" provinces themselves, coupled with early and hard lockdowns have kept cases low.  More importantly, only 105 people have died.  That's it.  In the last year, only 105 people have died in Prince Edward Island (0), Nova Scotia (66), New Brunswick (33), and Newfoundland and Labrador (6).

That many people are dying every two to three days elsewhere in the country right now.

Let's take Ontario as an example.  There, Premier Doug Ford has been saying since the start of the year vaccines weren't coming fast enough.  Again and again, the federal Liberals were called out by Ford for not delivering vaccines fast enough.

What did he do to mitigate this?  Nothing.  He just said over and over he needed more vaccines in the province, but didn't do anything to make the need for the very hard to come by shots less urgent.  He could have imposed earlier restrictions, and blamed the feds if he wanted to.

Never mind that the rate of vaccine delivery is basically on schedule — minus some supply chain issues — even if the federal government wasn't fulfilling their obligations, other things could have been done.  They weren't.

You can see some version of this play out elsewhere across the country.

And when a province fails, there's no way for the federal government to step in and mitigate those failures.  If you live in a province where your premier has screwed things up — that is to say, if you're in most of the country — you're boned.

Leaders are happy to blame some other level of government for this or that failure, and then not do the things well within their powers to fix it.

The root of this problem, as I see it, is the way our federation is structured.  It's a weird amalgam of 19th Century ideas for how a country should be run.  Extreme decentralization makes a lot more sense when the telegraph is a new invention and a railway connecting the country is just a twinkle in the eye of the country's leadership.  Provinces are given huge heaps of power, but little ability to actually pay for the things they need.  The feds have huge fiscal powers, but little ability to act within the country.  It's a mess.

(We don't really have time to get into it, but cities are basically useless as political entities.  Little more than local tax collectors to get money to paint roads and hang street signs.)

Worse, there is now this idea within the country that there is nothing we can do to change the way this country is built.  Brian Mulroney tried that stuff decades ago and now it's a closed book forever.  But why?  Why do the failures of one man have to lock us into this constitutional order forever?

At the very least, our patchwork of health care systems should be cause for alarm.  One province finding its hospitals overwhelmed wouldn't be quite so dire in a truly national system.  A national system would be able to more effectively deploy resources, and relieve regional pressures.  Not just from city to city, but region to region.

Different provinces have different mixes of private and public options for their residents.  Here in Quebec, for example, there's a two-tired health system.  Public family doctors for some, private doctors for others.  Need blood work?  You can absolutely pay a clinic to get it done right away, but you better have the money.  Meanwhile, waiting to get a public family doctor can take ages (it took me something like 18 months to get mine).

Health is a provincial jurisdiction, but the feds foot huge parts of the bill.  All this does is create a situation where the premiers demand more money for health care but also demand no strings on that money.  The feds can't even convince the provinces to buy into a national vaccine tracking system.  It's a complete joke.

It's too late to fix the country in time to fix this crisis.  At the very least we need to start talking about how the country should run before the next one.

If things stay as they are, we're going to fail again.  Our country wasn't built for the modern world.  Unless we decide to remake it, that won't change.