OTTAWA—Who’s the cast of characters managing the COVID-19 crisis at the federal cabinet level?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau struck a special cabinet committee last week to focus the federal response to the novel coronavirus outbreak. It unveiled a $1 billion aid package Wednesday.

Here’s a look at Trudeau’s COVID-19 team:

Jean-Yves Duclos: Duclos is president of the Treasury Board, the central federal department that oversees spending: literally getting federal dollars out the door. Vice-chair of the committee, he is an economist who drafted many of the economic measures in the federal response package revealed Wednesday. In the last mandate he designed changes to child and family benefits credited with lifting more than 800,000 Canadians out of poverty.

Little known fact: Duclos, who taught at the Université de Laval before entering politics, has a long-standing passion for the intersection of health policy and the economy.

It’s an area he delved into as a program leader and researcher with the 15,000-member Poverty and Economic Policy international research network, looking at Senegal and other West African countries.

Before Wednesday’s measures to aid Canadian workers and businesses were unveiled, Duclos was as excited as you might think an economist gets.

“Economists often seem to think that health and economic conditions are separate, (that) health is for public health officials or specialists, and the economy or income is for economists. No,” he said emphatically.

“In fact there is a very strong connection between the two, so in this committee I have the great fortune of hearing those connections being made every day.”

Kirsty Duncan: The Deputy house leader, is there for one key reason: she’s an expert in pandemics. Duncan has a Ph.D in environment and human health, and was part of an international UN team on climate change that won a Nobel Prize.

But well before that, Duncan, a medical geographer, led an international team of experts in a search for the cause of the 1918-19 Spanish influenza pandemic.

The quest took them to the frozen graves of seven Norwegian coal miners in search of samples of the virus’ genetic material. Duncan wrote a book about the Spanish flu outbreak that by some estimates killed up to 100 million people.

She documented the scientific exploration, and the politics, sexism and “academic piracy” among those who tried to scoop her, the Canadian and Norwegian members of the team. She’s a stickler for ethical science, and for scientists’ responsibilities to the communities they serve.

The Conservative government of Stephen Harper tapped Duncan to advise it during the H1N1 pandemic in 2009.

In the COVID-19 outbreak, Duncan says her key focus is vulnerable groups, communities which face particular health and housing challenges, where disease can spread swiftly.

“1918 was a different time,” she said in an interview. The Spanish flu “was a different virus.” That was an influenza virus. This is a coronavirus.

The Spanish flu came in two waves, the second more deadly than the first, and killed healthy young adults within a few days. It wiped out thousands at a fell swoop, one city at a time. Canada lost between 30,000 and 50,000 people.

“There was no preparedness,” says Duncan. It swept the globe during the First World War before widespread hospital care, before antibiotics and antiviral treatments were widely available.

Duncan says this is a very different pandemic, but one that is evolving rapidly. She’s been watching it shift via the scientific reports since she read the first report in late December of a strange viral flu out of Wuhan, China.

Duncan, who served as science minister in the last mandate, said she is most proud of creating a new scientific research fund designed to respond to fast-breaking needs, and believes it can be useful to get money out the door in the desperate search now for a COVID-19 vaccine or treatment. “It was created exactly for something like this.”

Chrystia Freeland: As deputy prime minister and intergovernmental affairs minister, her job titles explain in part why Freeland chairs the cabinet committee on the coronavirus — she’s Trudeau’s most trusted minister on files that cut across jurisdictional lines.

Freeland is a former financial journalist who has a global contacts list, and who understands economics and headlines. She reached out directly to Mike Pompeo Thursday after the U.S. said it would shut borders to European travellers. In this crisis, she is using the same, often annoying, media tactics used when she led the NAFTA negotiations: take control of questions, refuse to be nailed down on specifics, deliver a message and not get too tied up in red tape. She scolds journalists who try to interrupt.

But Freeland hits her mark: she has said for days that the “federal government understands this is an issue that really calls for federal leadership…This is not a moment or an issue where it is appropriate to quibble about what is the jurisdiction or the job of the federal government and what is the jurisdiction of the provinces.”

That’s a message that Canadians in a decentralized health-care system need to hear during a medical crisis.

Melanie Joly: The minister of economic development has been working the phones to determine the impact of COVID-19 on the tourism sector in particular, cognizant that “the number one risk for business and tourism is the health risk,” she said.

In her private life, Joly is lawyer and a business person who led a communications company that was hit hard by the 2009 economic downturn: “I had to rebuild it.” A major part of her work was crisis management for clients. Joly stumbled in the heritage portfolio over the issue of taxing web giants, but she is recognized as a good communicator in both official languages.

Joly says it’s important for the federal government to “proactively communicate” especially in a crisis like this one. “We have a moral responsibility to keep the confidence of people, keep the trust of people toward the fact that we’ve got their backs.”

Joly is now in charge of the regional development agencies that are a vehicle for federal governments to direct economic recovery money to businesses that need it most; that channelled money after the Fort Mac fires or the Saguenay floods and which, she says, know their communities best.

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Navdeep Bains: Minister of innovation, science and economic development, Bains was a senior financial analyst for three years in the Oakville headquarters of Ford Motor Co., a multinational company with a global supply chain, and says he brings a “deep and good understanding of the unique business needs” to the table.

“We’re seeing the challenges around COVID, it’s global in nature, it’s impacting small businesses and large businesses, disrupting supply chains…so those experiences from the automotive sector are useful,”

“You need everything in order to meet customer demands. You need to make sure that your suppliers are in a position to continue to meet the limited inventory levels that exist because of the just-in-time models that are in place now for productivity and flexible manufacturing.”

Companies across the country are facing those challenges, he said. He said his department has reached out to hundreds of businesses across Canada to understand the impact of the outbreak, and proposed solutions, on their work.

Maple Leaf Foods, he said, is a good example where telecommuting doesn’t help. “The workers need to physically be there. So when we come up with solutions, we need to recognize this new digital economy, certain companies have unique operational challenges which are difficult for them to be able to adjust to COVID-19.”

Marc Miller: The minister of Indigenous services, acknowledges he is on the committee specifically because of his role in cabinet.

A lawyer who specialized in mergers and acquisitions before entering politics in 2015, Miller is there to ensure the rights and interests of those communities are protected in the COVID-19 outbreak and not overlooked.

During the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, when the department of Health Canada delivered First Nations health services, H1N1 spread rapidly and reached pandemic proportions.

A study by the National Collaborating Centres for Public Health showed during H1N1 many Indigenous communities, especially those in remote and isolated areas, health services and human resources quickly became overwhelmed. Young Indigenous adults and children were most at risk for severe disease, according to a different study, which said the problem was in part due to residential crowding, prevalence of chronic health conditions, delayed access to health care or suboptimal immune responses to infection.

The responsibility for delivering health care to many First Nations communities and dealing with delegated health authorities was consequently later handed to the newly created department of Indigenous services.

Miller says for the past two months he’s been looking at ways to reinforce health services for Indigenous communities, to ensure there are enough gloves, masks, hand sanitizer, cleansers, drinking water — whether bottled or tanked in — and ways to provide ways for sick people to be isolated in communities with chronic housing shortages. The opposition ridiculed the idea of tents in March in some northern communities. Miller says the government will do whatever is needed.

“We’re positioning ourselves to act quickly specifically because of the vulnerability,” he said.

Patty Hajdu: The health minister in the eye of the storm. She has projected a cool, calm, and controlled manner since the onset of the outbreak. Hajdu told a health committee this week she is there “to provide health advice” and said she feels perfectly at home with the public health role she has, noting that she was in health promotion in her private life before politics.

Hajdu worked nine years at the Thunder Bay District Health Unit where she was a health promotion planner. Hajdu later worked as the city’s drug strategy co-ordinator.

She told a committee that her senior team have been working 14-18 hour days since early January.

Hajdu bristled at a suggestion by a Conservative MP that her department has not offered timely information to opposition MPs, saying that they were invited to attend daily situational briefings by the department. And she pushed back at the Conservatives’ suggestions that opposition members should be on the cabinet committee, saying her department has been open and transparent.

Bill Blair: The federal public safety minister was Toronto police chief during the H1N1 pandemic. During SARS, he was part of the Toronto police service’s senior command team.

Blair said since word of the coronavirus outbreak first came on the radar of government operations centre in early January, his officials have tried to prepare business continuity plans for all agencies, like the Canada Border Services Agency, the RCMP and Correctional Services.

Blair said the main priority then was to ensure co-ordination among first responders — police, fire, and paramedic services, along with hospitals. He oversaw plans to ensure the business of the police services would continue in the H1N1 crisis, and to make sure first responders had the training and equipment they needed.

In the end the Toronto police did not experience large numbers of workers off sick but Blair said planning for those potentially exposed was an important human resources issue.

Now Blair is in charge of the federal government operations centre, where many of the government’s ”business continuity” plans are being wrangled.

Carla Qualtrough: Minister of employment, workforce development and disability inclusion, is a lawyer and a Paralympic swimmer who has been visually impaired since birth.

An aide said her presence on the committee allows it to “have a better perspective on the impacts to Canadian workers and persons with disabilities.”

A rare cabinet minister who tries to answer questions responsively, not with talking points, Qualtrough was candid this week when she told reporters that although the feds have designed an employment insurance aid package for people who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or are self-isolated or in quarantine, that she was looking at whether there is a “quicker and better way so we don’t tax medical resources” at this time.

Bill Morneau: The finance minister, was well into finalizing details of the 2020 budget when the coronavirus outbreak hit two months ago.

He oversaw the urgent drafting of a new $1 billion aid package released this week, says a larger contingency fund will be set aside in his March 30 budget too, and is now contending with an economic shock that has sent a tremor through North American stock markets which halted trading twice this week.

Morneau used to head a large publicly traded human resources management company, Morneau-Shepell, and presumably has insight into just how rattled employers and employees are. Share values in his former company — where he no longer holds stock — fell nine per cent at market close Thursday.

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