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Some members of B.C. government need anti-hypocrisy vaccine

As a rule, B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix oozes gravitas and solemnity. He expresses furrowed condolences at public health briefings and tweets in memory of the lives lost to the coronavirus.
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As a rule, B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix oozes gravitas and solemnity. He expresses furrowed condolences at public health briefings and tweets in memory of the lives lost to the coronavirus. He has an earnestness that would be a magnificent acting job if insincere.

But it was shabby, selfish and silly to lay the blame with Telus this week for the phone line meltdown as British Columbians jammed the circuits for the first vaccination appointments. Petulance and some convenient hypocrisy oozed suddenly.

Some 47,000 British Columbians over 90 years old and 35,000 Indigenous people over 65 were eligible to call. More than 20 times that number of calls were placed, most never getting through.

There is plenty of time to regroup, the bookings haven’t even begun until next week, but no matter: Dix steamed into the telecommunications firm, saying, “They have a responsibility to deliver on contracts they signed.”

We would love to know what that contract called for in handling the appointment bookings. Of course, the government won’t say. But when Telus put 191 operators to field the calls Monday and 250 on Tuesday, I would buy the minister a socially distanced dinner of his choice if he or anyone anticipated and contracted for 1.7 million calls flooding the lines over the first 12 hours – a rate of about 740 calls per operator per hour, something even Elias Pettersson would not be nimble enough to handle.

Nevertheless, the bus approached and Dix heaved Telus beneath.

“People should be mad that the service provider didn’t come through here,” he said.

Get it together or there will be consequences, he warned.

It is fair to ask: Like what? Like the government taking it over?

Perhaps with the haphazard contact-tracing system that seems about a week out of sync with what you learn through friends or businesses about the coronavirus cases?

Perhaps with the computer system that crashed before Christmas when the NDP promised individuals $500 and families $1,000 cheques?

Telus CEO Darren Entwistle, recognizing the bigger picture here of the province’s largest tech firm and its government needing not to mutually scorch the earth while people in their 10th decades navigate the system to safety, didn’t shirk the minister’s outburst. He acted leaderly, accepted the responsibility, and said the company could do better and would. He was the grown-up in the room.

And to his credit, Dix’s boss John Horgan at first said you could blame whoever you wanted, said Telus was a “respected” provider, hinted it had not fulfilled its terms, but ultimately chalked it up as a “bad day.”

As he showed, sometimes sanguine beats tantrum in a tough strait.

Nevertheless, there are a lot of British Columbians who deserved a scolding. We have gotten used to shaming during the pandemic, so you’d think either Dix or Horgan would call them out for calling when it wasn’t their turn.

Crickets. Those are a lot of voters to reproach. Easier for an ideologically driven government minister to blame big, bad, non-unionized labour employer Telus, no matter that a government so certain it can foresee climate change could not foresee copious callers.

First off, a firm message or two to the province from the government – as in, c’mon people, let the real candidates through here – would have been great in advance and appropriate in the first couple of chaotic days.

Second, it’s evident that while all of us seemed to know about, oh, a year ago that one day we’d be getting a vaccine some year soon, the vaccination plan seems to have taken shape around the time the shipments started arriving instead of around the time research into them was conducted.

While blame is circulating, how is it that the leader of the vaccination effort, Vancouver Coastal Health chair Dr. Penny Ballem, runs the one health authority among the five in the province that did not have a backup system to field the calls when the Telus contracted lines were jammed?

And how is it that this far into the pandemic only the Fraser Health Authority among the five has an online booking system? Perhaps we did not anticipate 1.7 million calls Monday, but surely we anticipated in this full year of the pandemic that some day three million-plus British Columbians would need to make an appointment to be vaccinated? Where is the accountability for that?

The government says not to worry, an online system will be in place in mid-April, to which it must be told: You haven’t seen anything yet. Wait until the boomers, then the generation Jones, then the gen Xers, then the Xennials, then millennials, then the gen Zers bombard. It will make Monday’s mess of using an iPhone to actually phone seem quaint.

We have networks of support for our eldest in the communities. We have data galore. We have ElectionsBC to wrangle voters into appointed places.

How did we settle on a dial-in number as the one size to fit all, including the nonagenarians? How did we not prepare some time ago with some ingenuity across our vast health system to anticipate the most vulnerable elders would need specific attention?

They’re earnest questions deserving an answer from an earnest minister. And physicians, heal thyselves.

Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.