The Paul Wells Show - Did We Learn Anything from COVID?

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

COVID-19 exposed some serious weaknesses in Canada’s public institutions. So what have our governments learned? There has been no official attempt to answer that question thoroughly across the country. So two think tanks decided to take it on. They invited experts including politicians, senior public servants, Indigenous leaders and others, to get together and talk about what happened during the pandemic. The Institute for Research on Public Policy and the Institute on Governance released a new report about what they learned. The IRPP’s President and CEO Jennifer Ditchburn and Charles Breton, who runs the IRPP’s Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation, join Paul to talk about it.

What's the old saying? Those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it? There are governments who just haven't really even looked at any parts of their response. Does that make any sense? Today, learning lessons from COVID. I'm Paul Wells, the journalist fellow in residence at the University of Toronto's Monk School. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. At the risk of repeating myself, the government of Canada used to say that once we got out of

COVID-19, it would look at how we handled the pandemic. In April 2021, when Patty Hajdu was the Minister of Health, she said, quote, when the time is right, our government will be very open to examining very thoroughly the response of this country to the COVID-19 crisis, end quote. That hasn't happened. So almost a year ago, two think tanks did the job instead. They organized a conference in Ottawa to discuss the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now their report is out. They say Canada has some good stories to tell out of the pandemic. We had fewer deaths than many other countries. Our governments rolled out income support programs that got a lot of people through the worst of it. But other stuff didn't work as well. Trust in just about every institution

declined, whether you're talking about the federal government, the provincial governments, public health agencies, or the media. Federalism and the bureaucracy were strained to the limit. In other words, it's just fantasy to think we've learned all that we can learn from this major crisis. That's the biggest message the conference's organizers heard from the experts they invited. My guests this week are Jennifer Ditchburn, the President and CEO of the Institute for Research on Public Policy, and Charles Breton, who runs the IRPP's Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation. They join me to talk about what they learned. Jennifer Ditchburn, Charles Vuitton, thank you for joining me. Thank you for having us.

Thank you. I guess the first question that's going to come to mind for a lot of people when we say, here's a new report on COVID that's calling for more reports on COVID, is why should we? Wasn't living through it enough? That's a very good question. And it's the first, and I understand why people would think that. And in a way, the we here is important. I think one of the reasons that there hasn't been that many, and it's something that we can get into later, is that people are tired to talk about, like, they're done with it. Like, they don't want to talk about it anymore. And I think for everyday

people, that's completely understandable and fine. And myself like i in a way like when i read read the papers i don't want to read about it anymore uh but that's separate from governments right uh and that's not because people don't want to talk about it anymore in the streets and read it in the news that there isn't some work there that governments need to do and that they haven't done. And there are governments who just haven't really even looked at any parts of their response. And so that's a question. Does that make any sense? That like that huge crisis we were on in for like maybe not four years,

but we weren't in crisis mode for four years, but let's say for two years, that we don't even look back at it? Does that make any sense? And I think we figured that the answer was, it doesn't really make sense that we need to look at it more. The people who might have to respond, or the people who are in the functions that might have to respond to another crisis in the future should apply lessons learned. And it seems to me that about 20 years ago during SARS, that was obvious to the various

players and the sort of exercise that you're proposing was carried out at federal and provincial levels. Whereas after COVID, not so much. That's right. I wonder, it's a good question to pose why it happened then and not now. And it perhaps this pandemic is just seems so huge, so unwieldy. Not that SARS was an important period of time, but you could argue it was a little bit more contained. And the scale is completely different. The way that this seeped into every facet of our social economic lives,

you know, haven't seen that in over 100 years. And as Shah was saying, governments across the country have taken different snapshots of what's happened during the pandemic. So we had a lot of auditors general reports, and federal government departments who have done great work looking at this, but nothing's sewn together. And in a federation like we're living in, you really need to have a sense of the national response to COVID. And Paul, as you know, the challenges coming at us, they're not siloed, sorry, I hate that word, but by province or even nation anymore, they're coming at us on multiple fronts. So we have to get, you know, have this reflex to be able to look at things cohesively and as a whole, instead of our just our individual little envelopes

of responsibility. Yeah. So it just doesn't happen that there's a gigantic Titanic crisis that nobody saw coming, but only the health minister of Saskatchewan has to worry about it and their colleagues don't have to. That's not the way the world works. Precisely. And climate change is the same thing, right? I mean, it's more of a slow moving crisis or actually it seems a little faster moving now, but it's not going to be something that individual premiers and federal ministers are going to be able to tackle independently. Now, tell me how this report and the conference that it reports on came to be. I wrote about the conference that was run jointly by the IRPP and by the Institute on Governance last year.

How did that conference come to be and what hole was it seeking to fill? We had had meetings, Jennifer and I, with David McLaughlin at the IOG when he was still the clerk. I don't know if that's the actual title of Manitoba. They all have different titles in the provinces, but... The senior public servant. Exactly. Yeah, he was still in the Manitoba government. Yeah. He was there at the beginning of the pandemic. He was in it. He was really living it. In a hotel, I don't think he had a place yet in Manitoba when it hit. And he was by himself in a hotel. I don't think he had a place yet in Manitoba when it hit. And he was like, he was, it was by himself in a hotel room doing his clerk job. But towards the end of the first wave,

David had gotten in touch with us, like he was already kind of trying to think about lessons learned in his role as clerk. And then he got swept by the second wave. And then all of that got lost. But then he moved on to the IOG. And we got together again, trying to see what we could do. And to be honest, at the beginning, we just, you know, we sent a few feelers of people we'd want to put in a room. Like we wanted people that, you know, usually wouldn't really talk to each other that much outside of like the crisis period. So, you know, a mayor with a premier or people in the civil service, senior civil servant at the federal level with people at the provincial level in a different portfolio, for instance, you know, people who don't necessarily meet to talk, but who all had a different role to play in the response. them what the lesson is learned again like this exercise is not and and even what we think government should do like it's not trying to blame anyone like we're not looking back like it's really looking looking back a bit to you know see see what we did right and what we did wrong but it's

really about learning lessons so anyways so the goal was to put all of these people in one room and we sent a few feelers and really quickly the message that we received was that's great like if you had called me a year ago i I would not have wanted to do it. It was still too fresh, too raw in a way. But now is a good time. And so we did. So that was kind of the idea behind. And really, the response we got was like, OK, I think there's an appetite for that,

at least to do it the way we did, like a two-day conference, Chatham House Rules. So again, it wasn't like a large inquiry or whatever you want to call it for travel to country, but we did hear from people from different governments. Like it wasn't just a federal government thing. So that was the goal. And then we had committed that this was not just a two-day conference where people talk and then there's nothing after that.

So we had committed to writing our own report, reporting on what we heard in our own report, reporting on what we heard in our own recommendations, which is what we released. So the conference, the gathering was really quite wide, quite ambitious. You clearly rejected any temptation to just focus in on one aspect of the COVID response. It was basically how did Canadian institutions respond to this historic crisis? The way you break it down is that you talk about the public health response, the effect of COVID on federalism, the effect of COVID on the public service, and then the effect of COVID on our democracy in general.

What's your sort of top line elevator pitch for what you've concluded? Second lesson is that the institutions of federalism work until they don't, which is a little bit of a cheeky title, but we can drill down a little bit into that too. Learning to navigate and communicate risk and uncertainty is a public service necessity. And I think this is perhaps a controversial area because people look at the Arrive Can, what do you want to call it, a boondoggle, and they think, why would you want public servants to take more risks? But there is an argument to be made there. And also, the communications function of any public service is critically important in any kind of crisis. And finally, public institutions cannot work without public trust. I think that's understood, but we felt it was worth underlining. And there is a definite erosion of trust since the pandemic.

So high trust at the beginning, and then it eroded away, and we're still seeing it continue to erode. Trust is not all that strong with our institutions. And Paul, I know that's a subject that you touch on in your writing too. So those are the kind of four big takeaways, and then we have recommendations that flow from them. Now, again, you did this because somebody had to, and governments weren't leading in a sense, at least in the sense of a federal-led, national, public, interdisciplinary or sort of inter-institutional assessment of the response to COVID. Now, governments will come back. And I mean, when I put the question to the federal government, they say there are all sorts of investigations and assessments at all sorts of levels.

And as a matter of fact, you list, I think, 61 different reports. 38 of them come from auditors general. So two-thirds of the various federal and provincial stock takings that have happened have come from auditors general. And only four of them are from independent outside analysts. So only in four cases out of six, you know, I'm trying to do the math. But anyway, out of 61, have they reached out and asked someone to please come in and kick the tires on this? It does seem like there's a real reluctance to air dirty laundry.

Does that match what you've heard? I mean, I think that's the, it's the only reason I can see. The one thing, and again, I work on federalism, I think that's the, it's the only reason I can see the one thing. And again, I work on federalism, so maybe that's just me, but there's one thing that really bothers me or pains me here is that people during the pandemic kept complaining that it was confusing because every province was doing something differently. And that was a problem. That's a lot of what we heard. And, and, and the doctors that came out in the British Medical Journal calling for an inquiry, that's one of their main thing, like the federal government

should have been more forceful. There's too much different things happening at the same time in the provinces. To me, that's how it's supposed to work. That's how it is in a federation. But we're supposed to learn from that. And because people are trying different things. And if provinces don't do the kind of work that you were describing, there's a, a, an opportunity to learn things that gets lost. Like all these things that provinces tried,

if no one is studying them, putting it out there, if we don't know if there's no one comparing across provinces, then we're not learning anything. And that's, that's really an opportunity that's lost. But yeah, to go back to your question, I think, I do think that that that is the main reason. And to be honest, like, not all of those external reports, like those, those four that you've listed, they're not all created equal either.

Some people would say that the Manning report in Alberta is not that useful. I would disagree. I think it's out there. It's useful. You take it for what it is. And the provinces and territories are really curious about each other. So Shaul and his team at the center, they put together this COVID stringency index during the pandemic to track all the provinces, territories, what they were doing in terms of their public health measures. So it was designed as how stringent were the restrictions at various points in time in various jurisdictions.

Okay. And you can still find that on the website, but we discovered that the provinces and territories were going to our page because they had no other source of information on what was Yukon doing? What was Quebec doing? There's no collector. There's no body in Canada that says we're going to collect the data about, you know, what each province is doing.

Now, perhaps there was some body that was doing it secretly, but definitely not publicly. And the other thing, Paul, that I think about in terms of the reluctance to have some kind of an examination. We don't use the word inquiry because we think that has a kind of pejorative. There's always some kind of blame sort of stuff. But many of us remember the Gomery Commission towards the end of the life of another government. And I think maybe there, some wounds there. My guess is that when you think of like opening, opening something to investigation and an independent body that you can't a hundred percent control where it's going to go.

But there's also a notion that you're trying to find some wrongdoings, right? In an inquiry, which is not what we're like, that's not what we're saying is what's missing here, right? It's. Yeah. I have to say, I have been calling for some sort of public stock taking for more than a year now. If I was the chief of staff

to a sitting prime minister, I don't know what I would advise that prime minister because I do suspect that any opposition party from day one of this process would say, this is our chance to finally unmask

the terrible incompetence of our catastrophic government. And then they would simply never get off that dime. They would simply never approach it from any other way. Am I overly pessimistic in thinking that that's how it would go? No, I think you're right. And maybe we need Manitoba to do it first, given that they've changed government since then. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I believe that's actually one of the reasons why it was possible to look back on SARS in 2003 was that a new liberal government was able to assess the performance of the previous conservative government. Well, the other thing, you know, one of our recommendations is around doing a complete review of government IT infrastructure, not just a piece of it, but a large review. And I know there's been others in the past, but someone has to be empowered in cabinet that can

actually enact change to this mess that we have in digital and IT infrastructure, in the federal government in particular. So you could argue that this is something that the federal government could take on in a more concerted way that would maybe turn the dial from some of the more specific challenges that they're having. with this they probably haven't forgotten phoenix quite yet which you know originated from the previous government but um there's a problem that has to be addressed um pretty fast just to make yourself crisis proof for the next thing whatever it could it could be cyber attacks it could be anything right that comes at us so but i mean i don't think you're being pessimistic i think you're being realist and but that's not a reason not to call for it. Because again, I mean, this is not, this is like doing something like this, like a public stock taking doesn't win you election, right?

And no one's calling for it in the public. Again, we started with that. Like the public wants to move on. So like you would be doing it just because it seems like a good idea and we think it is, but like the chances there are pretty slim. Yeah. And again, the reason to do it, despite the political drag that it might involve, is that there will be some other massive shit storm. And the reason everyone has the same anxiety dream, which is that it's final exams and I never read the course material and I don't have the textbooks, is because that happens way too often in real life too. And so if we cling forlornly to the notion that governments have responsibilities to citizens as well as simply marketing opportunities, this would be one of the opportunities, one of the responsibilities. And the other thing is people are moving on fairly quickly. You know, people who are in the thick of it, you know, they're maybe at the end of their careers, people in senior positions. So

will they be around to recount exactly what happened? Will their memories be fresh if you wait too much longer? That's part of the concern to get people when they're still in a sort of immediate aftermath of the pandemic. Now let's go through some of your broad thematic conclusions. But before I do that, I want to check in on this stringency index, which again is a province by province measure of whether they were more

or less restrictive in their public health orders during the pandemic. I'm going to ask a super simple question. Is it clear from this analysis whether one province did better than the others or? It depends what better means here. I mean, it's clear, like there were tendencies and moments, like it's clear, for instance, that like throughout the pandemic, Saskatchewan and Alberta were doing their own thing. It ranged from zero to 100, that index we measured. At some point, we had like 16 different public health measures that were combined together

for that index. And there are points in time where you had like province at an average of like 45 or 50, and yet Saskatchewan and Alberta at like 10. So it's clear that there was something very different going on there in terms of their approach to those public out measures. It's also clear that everyone did the same thing in the first month, right? Like in the first month of the pandemic, even Alberta and Saskatchewan, like everything was just closing because we didn't know what to do. But it's really after that, that there started to be a lot of variation. You could see the waves too, right? Like with like the stringency index going up and down, like not all the provinces were

being hit at the same time similarly. But no, I mean, in terms of who did well or not, like it's really hard to know. It makes it clear though, the difference approaches Ontario and schools, like the index makes it clear that there is no other jurisdictions in Canada that close schools for as long as Ontario did. So then you have questions there that you could look into. It's like, what's the process that led to that decision? Was that process different than what was going on in other provinces? The decision was different, but was the process different?

What worked well? What did not? We don't know. What worked well, what did not, we don't know. Somebody at the conference pointed out that Ontario closed schools or institutes work, study from home, remote schooling again and again and again for months at a time. Whereas British Columbia basically never kicked kids out of the schools. I would sure want to know what the impact on school success over the medium and long term is of those decisions. Oh, for sure. And I mean, I'm blanking on the name of the public health officer in British Columbia,

Bonnie Henry. When I was getting ready to interview her at my old job, I got a lot of worried emails from parents in British Columbia. And they were all parents who thought she wasn't being nearly stringent enough, that she was being essentially lackadaisical with things like school opening and closing. And yet one of the other things you point out in your report is that if there's a next time, it's going to be very difficult to be as stringent as governments were the last time. as stringent as governments were the last time.

That essentially public tolerance for that sort of draconian universal lockdown is kind of burned out. Schools, I would say, this is so anecdotal, but when you talk to people in your community, that seems to be one of the biggest wounds. And business too, right? be one of the biggest wounds and um business too right small businesses who are still closing you know because of the damage inflicted by the pandemic and some of us are all you know still living with the the ramifications of the schools being closed i mean i bet you you you talk to three or four of your friends who have children and they're going to tell you a story about what happened to their kids and whether it's mental health challenges or it's academic challenges that happened during,

during the pandemic. And that's an area we did not touch on, but someone should someone should really look at what the overall impact was and what, what would be the best case scenario in scenario in the event there was another public health crisis. I mean, it was clear that, so people in the conference, like that was a bit, I mean, I don't know, I don't think sad is the right term, but like what people were saying was just like, we pray that like the next crisis is not like a pandemic where we need to put in public health measures, restrictions, and where the solution is a vaccine.

So you really hope it's not something that looks too much like the last crisis. Exactly, because it's impossible to know now whether we would be able to do what we did four years ago now. And heaven forbid the next virus is nastier. Yeah, exactly. Well, there you go. Yeah. Our children weren't dying from this one, but how quickly we forget about H1N1 and this is before Charles' kids, but my kids and your kids, Paul, I mean, we were lining up to get them vaccinated right quick for, that was the swine flu, right?

The name of it. Yeah. If I'm getting it right. Okay, let's go through some of these things. Institutional capacity, you say, can't be taken for granted. First, a quick definition of institutional capacity and then how did we see that it was tested during COVID? Here, we're mostly talking in a way about the public service

in the sense that they were able to do talking in a way about the public service in the sense that they were able to do in a way again there were mistakes that were that were made but they were able to do miracles in some in many respects in spite of either human resources or actual physical infrastructure that were built from for 1965 and i'm just i took a date like that. But like, it wasn't ready for something like this. And so yes, they were able to react rapidly. They were people that were being basically working around the clock here. But like, that's not a way to respond to every crisis. Like we can't expect people to be heroes every time. Like there is a foundation and infrastructure there that needs to be brought up for this century.

And yes, the federal government, but also in provinces as well. And again, the problem here, as I mentioned earlier, is that like investing in those things that doesn't really win you elections. But that's the basis of like the service to the public is to be to be able to have that foundation that can that can allow you to turn quickly, to make you agile, nimble, which was not always the case during the, especially the early days of the pandemic. So if you're able to not quite handle day-to-day routine, then you're going to be in a big mess when some stress comes along that requires a much heavier involvement from the public service. Exactly. And even outside of the public service, like we talk here about one recommendation, and we're not the first to say that one. And we're just kind of repeating a bit what's been

said before, but it's important. There is no real way to share data in real time in this country that's important for people, for instance, who are doing the epidemiological model, like what's going on in Alberta with the virus compared to Ontario, when is it going to come here? Like people were involved in that. And like, there's no real data sharing pathways that existed for something like that. So again, like that's kind of an institutional foundation that needs to be shored up for it to make sure that we're able to respond to the next crisis, even though it might not look exactly like it, but clear that that's a place where we need to spend more effort and money. A second conclusion that you reach is that the institutions of federalism work until they don't. I got to say, even the first half of that feels a little over optimistic to me.

they don't. I got to say, even the first half of that feels a little over-optimistic to me. Lately, it feels like the institutions of federalism don't work great until they work worse. Yeah, true. One of the things that's a kind of crossover type recommendation that we have from, you know, in terms of both institutional capacity and federalism is that during the pandemic, all these different bodies were created, half of them with long names that we wouldn't be able to remember off the top of our head, but, you know, a federal provincial territorial table on X, or, you know, inside the federal government, there were a bunch of new pathways for meetings and structures, we call them structures. So one thing we recommend is to sort of map out the structures that were created. So we've provided in our report some sense of the

committees that met and so on. But we don't have the same insight that the federal government, provinces, territories, Indigenous governments have as to all the different committees that were formed. And so we think they should figure out what they were, record them, and evaluate which ones were actually useful in a crisis and which weren't, so that they can be dusted off and reactivated in a time of future crisis. And then another thing that was abundantly clear in our conference was the feeling that, you know, the institutions of federalism such as they are, are not inclusive. They routinely disregard Indigenous governments or treat them as stakeholders or special interests rather than another order of government that should be consulted meaningfully. that should be consulted meaningfully.

And the cities, and we know this is a longstanding grievance, but you want to be talked to more in a more structured way because in the pandemic, they were the ones that were providing most services to people at a ground level. And so the feeling that they had was that they were being brought in at the last minute or consulted in a more irregular way. So those are some of the things that they had was that they were being brought in at the last minute or consulted in a more irregular way. So those are some of the things that arose for us.

And we're recommending just more attention to the inclusivity of how the Federation works. These are grand ideas, right, Paul? Yeah. At least we hope we're starting a conversation here. At least we hope we're starting a conversation here. And as a matter of fact, the report even calls for a sort of a formal recognition of Indigenous governments as participants in crisis planning and management. And, you know, that sounds woke or politically correct until you remember that Indigenous populations were among the most vulnerable, among the most endangered, and a really substantial part of the public policy response. And if the notion of nothing about us without us has any meaning at all, then it should have meaning in a situation like this.

Well, it's part of our constitution too, right? Yeah. It's also because it would have been more effective too. Like if you go through the guard, like they know how to talk to their people. Like that's more effective anyways, right? Especially in a place where trust is hardly guaranteed. Exactly, and for good reasons.

Boy, I could talk, I could have used this whole hour just talking about communications because it's a bugbear of mine. But your report has a lot of language about how communications is critically important in a situation like this. How come and with what ramifications? I mean, there are different parts here. But I think we focus a bit more on uncertainty as something that's with us in many respects today. Every problem that the country will have to face,

will have an important amount of it, will be uncertain. And that ties in with the trust issue as well. It was clear that people did not know, and by people, I mean people who were speaking to us, like whether public health officials or elected officials, they felt like they had to project a sense of certainty about their measures about what they were doing, when in fact, it wasn't the case. And with good reasons, like things were evolving, changing. And when you say that you're certain about something, and two days later, you're certain about a different thing, that's not the first thing.

Like at some point, people just kind of stop listening to what you're saying. And like we always give the same example with that. And it's the masks. At first, like they weren't working. And then all of a sudden, it was the best thing you could do. But all of this to say that we're saying, like, if you're in charge of communicating a message, learn how to communicate uncertainty to people and, and trust that your audience is capable of taking it. Um, and I know

this is difficult, especially now, like I'm, I'm talking with, with two, two journalists here, Jennifer, I'll, I'll, I'll say that you're still a journalist. Um, it's hard for public officials to go on the stage and say, I don't know, because people like you, too, will say, no, but that's not a good response. That's not a good answer. You should know. You're in a position to know. But sometimes it is the true answer. They don't know.

Or they know a little, and they're not hiding anything. It's just that that's the state of things. Anyway, so as a society, as communicators, we need to be better at communicating uncertainty in terms that people will understand. We need to trust that people will be able to deal with it. We need to learn to accept uncertainty as well when it's being communicated to us. Those are big things, big ideas, but like every issue that we'll face in the future will also be uncertain. This gets back to the sort of cartoonish notion of modern communications that just makes me crazy. The idea that public actors can only, they can only talk about success. They can only acknowledge success. They can only talk about a sort of a hero narrative where if I'm a government,

my government is making things happen rather than things happening extraneous to my efforts. things happen rather than things happening extraneous to my efforts. And a real crisis with a stack of unknowns is simply not the kind of environment where that attitude is going to work. Where if you only talk about success, but you have no idea what just happened or what's going to happen. If you only talk about the government being the actor where the virus is in charge and the virus doesn't care what your philosophy is, I think this is one of many arenas in which,

and I'm just sort of borrowing you guys for my bully pulpit for a second, but this is one of many ways in which, one of many areas in which we really need to update our notion of modern communications because the kindergarten version that's being practiced these days is just not up to the task.

But I think Paul and Shaul opened the door here referencing our professional backgrounds. But I think there's some blame can be left with journalists. And I've come to a different appreciation having been out of day-to-day journalism for eight years. But this kind of approach to covering governments and I'll say more specifically public services as any error or gaffe that occurs in a public services headline. Yes, that's what journalists are supposed to do, but the bigger picture is missing. So the bigger picture of what kind of government do you want to have, you want a modern government, you want a government that has modern IT systems,

you want public servants that can deal with crises nimbly and are well trained. Nothing about modern journalism actually supports that. Because, and I did this, I mean, I did this for 19 years. You're like watching for someone who trips and then you're reporting on that. But nothing actually is encouraging the overall public interest, which is to have a system that functions well. the overall public interest, which is to have a system that functions well. Yeah. I mean, so especially given the terrible state of staffing and job security and in journalism these days, there are fewer and fewer beat reporters. So there's fewer and fewer

people who are equipped through long observation to notice incremental changes in a institution or, observation to notice incremental changes in a institution or, you know, so they, they, they come in, they're fresh on every story. They've got 20 minutes for every story. And what gets noticed in an environment like that? Disarray, conflict, and hot emotion. Uh, and, uh, everything else, journalists are less and less, not through any personal weakness, but just because the institution's in such a mess. They're in very poorly placed to understand something a little more nuanced and complicated. But public actors have more avenues than they ever have to go around journalists and to communicate their own message directly. their own message directly. And it does them no honor if they skate around journalists so that they can deliver a dumber, more simplistic message directly to citizens.

Exactly. Well, you're totally right about that. And I left day-to-day journalism shortly after this liberal government came into power. But my observations from reading you and others, Paul, is that the communications approach has stayed exactly the same. And I mean, we're talking about trust here and trying to rebuild it. Like how, for instance, Paul, the work that you've done on the Walport report or whatever that will be called. Yes. How the way they're dealing with this this how does it build back that trust it doesn't like are you trying to hide it what's going on what is this like if you're doing the work show it like transparency about those processes those will build trust trying to do

it and not tell to anyone that that's going on i i don't see how that's a good thing an absolute refusal to answer simple questions while pretending to answer them isn't going to fool anyone. That's true. And so now we're around to trust. And you measure in quantitative ways in this report, trust in public health authorities, local health administrators, the World Health Organization, provincial governments, federal governments, municipalities, the media, and social media, trust in all eight of those institutions declined over the course of the pandemic. We became a more suspicious bunch than we had been from the outset. And there's some people listening to this who simply don't believe there was a virus, or they simply don't believe that the vaccines work or more complicated level of mistrust they believe that all of us conspired to foist this

pandemic on the population so that we could institute socialism afterwards what do you do with that part of the public um discourse yeah i mean i'll say two things. The first thing I want to say is that when we talk about trust, that's declined, there is a good chunk of it. That's just every day. Like we're not even talking about conspiracy here, just people who've lost trust and, and sometimes for very good reasons.

And that one is probably easier to maybe easier, not easier to rebuild, but has kind of different ways of rebuilding it. But for the disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy part, it's clear. And not all people who believe in these stories have this kind of very whole notion, like they're not all conspiracy theorists on all aspects, right? Sometimes they'll believe just one little thing or what. theorists on all aspects, right? Sometimes they'll believe just one little thing or what. So here, one thing that we recommend is, again, more work, but a task force on this. And for one specific reason that we think that that's required is that there is a lot of very good work

on disinformation, misinformation, the sources of it, what makes someone vulnerable to it, what are the ways of dealing with it from a government standpoint. There's a lot of good work done on this at the federal level, within the Privy Council office at Impact Canada or Impact and Innovation Unit, whatever they're called now. And they do very serious work. But in a way, that's kind of the least useful place to have this research, because who at PCO has to deal with disinformation

on the ground every day? I mean, in a way they do in messaging. But what we're saying is that there are a lot of people in the provinces, at the municipal level, who don't have access to this knowledge, and should, because they're, I mean, at the municipal level, I don't know

where it, how it is in other provinces, but here in Quebec, we have a problem with mayors day-to-day just quitting because they can't deal with the stuff that they're hearing. They're being abused. They're being hounded out of office, essentially. Exactly. Exactly. So anyway, so those are people who should have the tools to deal with misinformation and disinformation, right?

And so one way to make sure that disinformation and this knowledge as to tools to deal with misinformation and disinformation, right? And so one way to make sure that disinformation and disknowledge as to how to deal with it and the sources of it gets down is to have a task force that's not just within PCO. Not that, again, not that they don't do good work. They do actually great work on this, but it needs to trickle down to the ground, basically. And so that's what we're recommending here. basically. And so that's what we're recommending here. This kind of activist response to widespread misinformation, disinformation is based on two assumptions or maybe two conclusions. One is that it's worth doing, and two is that it'll be effective. I mean, I know a lot of people who say,

these people who believe in conspiracy theories and out there ideas, just leave them alone. They're unreachable. That's another discourse that doesn't intersect with ours and can't be made to. And that with the decline of traditional media or media that actually invest in collecting facts, more and more of us in our communities have nowhere where we can have reliable information. So it's going to get worse, is our impression, in terms of what's out there and what people are eating every day in terms of their daily news diet. are eating every day in terms of their daily news diet. And so going forward, every government identifies this as a challenge to get, you know, no matter what political stripe you are, you have to contend with this. The other aspect of public trust, Paul, that, you know, we heard at the conference, and it's the one that really sticks with me, is on civil society and the distance between governments and people at the civil society level, for lack of a better term. Let's say the grassroots level, the ground level.

And we have these interlocutors that are community leaders and doctors and priests and rabbis and others that are in contact with groups and need to be talked to before the next pandemic in some fashion. So, you know, governments need to bridge the gap that they have. And you saw this happen. This is the federal government, you know, did admirably, but they had to scramble to figure out how do we communicate to people, to these pockets of people that are non-responsive to messaging about vaccines or about wearing a mask or what have you. And they had to turn to religious leaders and Indigenous leaders and others to help craft their message. leaders and others to help craft their message. But when you filter that down even further, the provincial level, the city level, there are a lot of challenges reaching different cultural communities, different people who had resistance, not because they were conspiracy theorists, but they might have an issue with believing governments in general. You might come from a different country

and where you were taught not to believe what a government said. So that's one area I think that there's work to be done to create more connection with civil society before the next crisis, whatever it is. This is something that I have come to believe more strongly over the last four years rather than less, which is that people who are loaded up with suspicion about the way governments treat them are not, that doesn't come from nowhere. There is a basis for that mistrust that should be addressed pretty much consistently and certainly in a crisis. One of the participants in last year's conference gets quoted in the report, and the quote is so striking that I wanted to read it and get your reaction to it before we close.

Somebody who isn't identified because everybody at that conference was speaking off the record says, we are pulled further apart than I feel like we've been in a really long time. It's something that is now permeating not just federal politics, but every level of political discourse, from the school board election all the way up. So this isn't something that a change in one party's leadership is going to change. This is like a wholesale endemic thing. I don't know how you get it out of the DNA of our politics now. It seems to be that feeling that everything's broken, if I could put it that way, is the background noise for so much of what we've been talking about today. I think that's right. And I also think that the part that's important to remember is that, again, a change in government, for instance,

won't fix that. Even if the person coming in would like you to think that it'll is that, again, a change in government, for instance, won't fix that. Even if the person coming in would like you to think that it'll fix that, it won't, because that's not the problem. The problem is not just the current government at whatever level you have in mind when I'm saying that. And we have a few recommendations on how to rebuild trust, but I think the main point that I'd like people to understand is, that's something that we really need to think about. Like, maybe our recommendations are not the right one. I don't I think they're a good start. But like, how do we and by trust, I mean, in the institutions generally, and across the board, not just one specific government. And that's, that's a very, very, very worrisome situation, and a very, very tricky problem to solve, too. The whole idea of tears in the social fabric is something that over the next

number of years is going to be, I think, headline topic, and extremely difficult to grapple with issues of identity and issues of common purpose. And perhaps that's why there's so much nostalgia around the passing of Brian Mulroney. I think people had this sort of longing for a time, perhaps it never existed, but a time where there seemed to be some broad consensus, or if there wasn't a consensus that at least you didn't hate each other for it. You talk to any politician, federal provincial right now,

and it'll take you like five minutes before you get to the topic of people being so divided in their communities, their constituents being so divided. So, so that's a big part of it. And I, I totally agree. It's,

it's kind of the, the shadow or, or the shadow or the background of this report. And we're definitely going to hear more about it as the years go by. It is the stuff of our lives these days, I guess. Charles Breton, Jennifer Ditchburn, thanks so much for taking the time to share your report and your thoughts with me today. Thank you for having us. Thank you. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the University of Toronto's

Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Our producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producers are Laura Reguerre and Stuart Cox. Our opening theme music is by Kevin Bright and our closing theme music is by Andy Milne. Go to paulwells.substack.com to subscribe to my newsletter. You'll also get a premium version of this show with bonus content. We'll be back next Wednesday.