The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Episode 50

Episode Date: December 17, 2021

This is a sample of the Munk Members-Only Podcast. The program provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. This week's Munk Members podcast explores two issues in the news. First, its official…the world is now bracing for a massive surge in COVID cases brought about by the Omicron variant. Why is it that twenty months into this crisis are we still responding to the virus with the threat of mass school closures? Are we fine as a society for children to bear the brunt of the Omicron wave while mass sporting events continue along with restaurant dining and unvaccinated workers going into long-term care homes? What does this say about our collective values if we once again deny children their right to education in the weeks and months to come? Second, in swing states across America, Trump supporters are winning local elections for key positions that oversee voting processes and policy. How at risk is America's democratic infrastructure from a partisan take over? If this is happening, what does it mean for the midterm elections and 2024? And how can a democracy like America work if the machinery of elections themselves are explicitly partisan and politicized? To access the full length episode consider becoming a Munk Member. Membership is free. Simply log on to www.munkdebates.com/membership to register. Under your membership profile page you will find a link to listen to the full length editions of Munk Members Podcast. If you like what the Munk Debates is all about consider becoming a Supporting Member. For as little as $9.99 monthly you receive unlimited access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, monthly newsletter, ticketing privileges at our live and online events and a charitable tax receipt (for Canadian residents). To explore you Munk Membership options visit www.munkdebates.com/membership. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, Monk podcast listeners. The following is a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the full-length edition of this episode and all of our regular Monk members-only podcasts, go to our website, www.com, and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www. Monk Debates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this. regular Friday monk members only podcast where we dig into the big issues and ideas in the news, exploring topics and issues that we think are important to understanding this incredible moment that we're all living through together as our guide and as my guest on this program each week

for what is this, Janice, I think we're coming up to 50 plus weeks of the monk members podcast with you. Janice Gross Stein joins me. Janice, great to be in dialogue. Great to be here. Rudyard, we are almost at an anniversary. That's right. And thank you so much for, I don't know, just being a friend and being a friend to all the listeners because the feedback, Janice, you're the star of the show. I acknowledge it after a year.

It took me, took me 50 weeks to figure that out. But based on the email, our Monk membership really appreciates these conversations. And we love the email we're getting, Reddard. So don't stop over the holidays. That's right. podcast at monkdebates.com. Well, Janice, for the last couple weeks, we have purposely resisted talking about the Omnacron virus because we felt that it was kind of premature to make big prognostications given what we just didn't know. But now we're starting to see a government response

catching up with what clearly is a tidal wave, is Boris Johnson. has called it of cases in Europe. And it's not hard to predict that that wave is now growing through community transition, transmission in Canada and the United States, and a public response is being marshaled. What I want to talk to you about, and I think you and I share some frustrations here, is we've been at this pandemic for 20 months now. You'd think after hundreds of billions of dollars and a World War II type level of societal effort and focus that we might have, we just might have 20 months into this,

learned a few things, come up with a few strategies that work. And what really depresses me, and maybe you'll let me later vent a bit about this as a parent of two young children, is we're still talking now, almost two years into this, about closing schools, about denying kids the right to education. We still haven't figured out, Janice, what our priorities. What are priorities are and how to protect and defend those priorities and some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Have I got this wrong? No, I think you were too kind. I don't think I think you did not vent enough there. Roger, let's focus for a minute on schools because that's where the intergenerational consequences are really terrible. We saw a way, you know, run through

long-term care homes and it's like devastating consequences on older people. And so the system pivoted and turned around to offer protection to older people against death from COVID-19. And there is an argument to be made about that. But in order to do that, we close schools. And to take one province in Canada, Ontario had the longest period of online learning. of any jurists. 27 weeks. That's half a year of any jurisdiction in North America. And we are just willfully blind to the consequences of online learning for different groups of kids. Right. So let's talk about the mental health issues, which even if you're capable of learning online with minimal support, there are huge mental health consequences. We know that adolescent girls there is an epidemic in eating disorders, which will take a long time, frankly. and there's not adequate therapists to help.

But beyond that, there is a class issue here too. If you have two working parents who have to go to work because they are essential workers in a factory and their kids are home alone, their children drop out. No lower-income families made heroic efforts, but their kids tended to drop out at a much higher rate. These kids lost half a year,

and they're the least able kids to lose that half of you. Take kids with any kind of learning disability who need support while they're learning and they're isolated at home. They fall off the grid. Even parents who are able to work at home, but there are two working parents and are attempting to keep their kids

focused on online learning have been driven absolutely crazy. And the thought of going through this again reduces them to tears. Now, here's what we're doing. where we could have learned and did not. And that's why I think you were too generous. There is something called a test to stay strategy.

You do mass testing in schools. It's called public health surveyors. You use rapid antigen screens every morning at home before your kid comes to school. It is not hard. And if you screen positive, your kid stays home. There is no reason to close us. school because there are two cases. There simply is no reason we've seen that already happen in

December. There are huge consequences for kids whose education has been disrupted. We're going to the third year of this. There should be a heroic question, this country now to get screens into schools into the hands of parents at home who do this. Now, if you test positive, you do not go to school, that's for sure. But unless we have, we have, you. We have, have the kind of rolling transmission and Omicron is massively mind-blowing, very contagious. That's all we can say. We know that already. We are getting breakthrough cases among people who have boosters, right, already in the city.

So, yes, there is a likelihood that when you get to 10 cases, 20 cases, and you close the class, but you close it from a period that the kids are still testing. or faculty, teachers are testing positive. And you reopen. That is not, how could we not have learned this in two years? How can we not have learned this? Instead, you know, what we're doing is we're allowing workers to go into long-term care facilities without being vaccinated.

Yeah. We're allowing Raptors games, professional sports games, to continue, oh, at half capacity. But hey, you know, we got to have our sports. And you know what? if you don't want to get vaccinated, you can still go into a long-term care facility with a bunch of people that are hugely vulnerable to this variant. But guess what, Janice, kids don't vote. You know, that's one thing I've really learned about this. But parents, phone.

Yeah, but kids in our society don't really have that much power. And it's become pretty clear that they get to carry the load, a lot of the load of this pandemic. And the rest of us, hey, you want to get to get to carry the load of this pandemic. get vaccinated, get vaccinated. Don't get vaccinated. You want to go to a Raptor's game? Go to a Raptor's game. Want to go to a strip club, a bathhouse, you know, be my guess. But hey, kids, suck it up. You're going to have to take, I think at minimum now, Janus, January is gone for, you know, a lot of kids in Canada in terms of the K-12 educational system starting in the new year. And what are we going do Janice just say, yeah, okay, stay at home kids. As you say, mental health, lost generation.

We're spending billions of dollars, Janice, saving the ends of people's lives that are, as we know, often the least meaningful life years, often the most someone who had a parent who died during the pandemic, who had dementia, I can tell you, it actually was a mercy for. her to, you know, to pass because her quality of life at that point had become so drastically degraded. Now I get that's everybody's, you know, decision and determination. But I just feel that we are courting a lost generation here. Yeah. Yeah. To save these fractions of, of life expectancy, of people who are at the end of their lives often living in

extremists at that period. And it just seems like we have all of our priorities wrong. We are failing this tests, not just epidemiologically, but morally. Yeah. So let's talk about what you do, what you have to do as a society to keep schools open, even when you have

a wildly contagious with chomachronis. It's wildly contagious. So one, if you look at this from the employment perspective, let's understand that two working parents who have two kids at home or a kid at home, their capacity to work is compromised, right? It just is, and they're exhausted from what they've done for the last two years. So let's not think about what happens to the restaurant industry or the sports industry alone without looking at the widespread damage to employment that comes from prolonged school closings.

So you shut down the things that are not really critical to people's lives over the next six weeks. Frankly, we can watch the Raptors on TV. Thank goodness, we can watch the Raptors on TV. If we're desperate for restaurant food, we can order it in. And you support the people who are taking huge losses.

I understand how painful. this is for the restaurant, the service sector. When you do that in an emergency, you shut all that down and you say to people, there's a rule here, five family members, 10 family members. You know, Staney Brown said yesterday, you need to help keep the schools open by cutting your socializing over the Christmas holidays. That's a tough message, but he's not to be right about that. But then let's put in place the testing that we've learned how to do.

We put the systems in place. It's easy. And what are we doing instead? We're throwing rapid screens out onto the streets, literally. At LCBOs. Pick them up at your local LCBO. Grab a bottle of wine and a rapid screen so that kids in schools can't use them. But hey, you can test before you go to a Raptors game or a strip club.

Or have somebody for dinner over the holidays. Again, it's all just so narcissistic, Janet. It is. It is. It is. It is. It is. It is.

involved. Like this is Code Red for children. As you said, mental illness, lost generation, learning and skills development, which will take years if it will ever be fully repaired and restored. And we're concerned about getting our rapid screening test so that we can all have a big Christmas ham or turkey dinner together because gee whiz, you know, that's what it means to be free and proud and and you know a morally upstanding and upright Canadian. Give me a break.

I agree, Richard. I think we have to take seriously the long term damage that is being done to this generation of kids. These consequences will continue for you I worry most frankly about boys in me who get

to a certain age, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. These are the people who are most fragile in schools that are not really, from my perspective, built to help boys. We see it in all the educational results. If you lose boys like this for two and a half years out of the system, they don't catch up when they go back.

In such months, there is a long-term lag here, which will spill out into employment opportunities, will have huge social consequences. So where I agree with you fully, we need our government to come out and say keeping schools open is their highest priority in January, February, March. Get behind it, everybody, and help your kids. They're not doing it, though.

They're not doing it. So look who's ranting today. Not you. No, I know, because you've got grandchildren. I've got children. This touches all of us. And that's why I just hope that people listening, and I know that we all care about this,

but we've got to mobilize. We've got to start expressing this. Get on Twitter. Get on your social media feeds. Email your local representatives. I know a lot of our listeners in the United States and the Northeast are facing the exact same problem. They had massive school closures also. We just, you know, we have to step up.

We just, we have to understand that there are causes and issues larger than ourselves. And if it's not our kids, then what are we, frankly? But a pretty pointless narcissistic society that maybe deserves this virus at that point. You know, we have one last point on this, because we need to move on. But we have a broader conversation, you know, I quite about financial systems and the difference between consumption and investment. And we're critical with governments that put a lot of emphasis on consumption, don't pay adequate attention to investing in the future

and to develop the kinds of skills and platforms that we will need to thrive in the future. What you do with your kids, as a society, is the biggest social investment. decision we make. It comes right down to how we treat kids and the kinds of education we provide for kids in those formative years. And we are failing that test in this pandemic as far as I'm concerned. Well, again, I just think parents, grandparents, sons and daughters, it's time to mobilize. It's time to make people's voices heard who are willing to stand up for the right to education, the right to education for our children. This is one of the most basic, fundamental things,

not just for them, but as Janice just so eloquently said, this is where we have to put our emphasis, our values and our stores of value as a society, financial, otherwise. It has to be around this generation, protecting them, nurturing them, fostering them through this conflict. And if we don't, this will be the great moral, stain on our generation, the moral stain that we will all carry as we witness, you know, absence of flourishing from this generation for decades to come. You're talking about the loss of

human potential on a scale that is unfathomable, spilling forward for decades. We have the choice now, in a matter of days and weeks, to come forward and act on this or not. So just, Everyone reflect on that. This is a choice. You all have to make it. We all have to make it individually. If we make it individually, maybe we can make the right choice collectively. Okay, we're going to take a quick break.

And when we come back, our second topic, one, you're not going to want to miss. You've been listening to a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the rest of the episode, consider becoming a member. Membership is free and available at www. Wunk Debates.com. Once you've joined as a member, go to your membership. profile to access the rest of this episode and all of our monk members podcast. Thanks for listening.