Politics
Can the pandemic teach politicians to take long-term threats seriously? – CBC.ca
The auditor general’s conclusion this week that the Public Health Agency of Canada “was not adequately prepared to respond to a pandemic” is disappointing. It’s also not entirely surprising — being inadequately prepared for a once-in-a-century pandemic is a failure that obviously was not unique to the Public Health Agency, or to Canada.
“The experience of COVID‑19 has provided a lived experience of a global pandemic, the nature of which Canada has not seen in over 100 years,” the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) wrote in its response to the auditor general.
The challenge now isn’t just to ensure our institutions are braced for the next pandemic. It’s also to think about how governments and societies can prepare for all the other once-in-a-century catastrophes that might happen.
“Reports like [the auditor general’s] will be written multiple times in country after country after country,” said Dan Gardner, a fellow at the University of Ottawa and author of Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear, in an interview this week.
“This is not unique to Canada. This is our species. This is how we roll.”
All the issues identified by the auditor general are worthy of attention. The system for managing data was inadequate. A risk assessment tool did not properly capture the probability of a future threat. And PHAC had “not contemplated or planned for mandatory quarantine on a nationwide scale.”
The auditor general’s report suggests officials tried to address shortcomings as problems emerged — and it might be hard to quantify exactly how the overall pandemic experience in Canada was affected by any one problem. But the AG is not the first person to say this country was not perfectly ready for COVID-19.
“There were really concerning reports from far away and we started to take measures. But, as we look back, there’s [a] lot of things that we probably would’ve wanted to do sooner in terms of preparing,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the CBC’s Rosemary Barton in December.
“I think the next time any leader sees reports of a possible flu-like virus coming out of some corner of the world, make sure we have the right stockpiles of [personal protective equipment] and start ordering more … There was a scramble there that I wouldn’t want to repeat.”
‘No one really cares … until the disaster happens’
As Trudeau noted, Canada was hardly alone in scrambling for PPE as countries realized they didn’t have enough on hand and supply chains were fragile or insufficient. But if governments had properly thought through what might happen in the event of a global pandemic — the likes of which the world has not seen since the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918 — they might have seen the problem coming.
“If you speak to anybody who deals with disaster management — which is foreseeing risks, mitigating the risks, dealing with them afterward — they will tell you it is almost a cliche in that field that you are starved for resources and no one really cares about your work until the disaster happens,” Gardner said. “At which point you [are] deluged with money — so much money that you don’t know how to use it.
“Then gradually, as time passes, you slowly evolve back to the previous position in which nobody cares about your work and you’re starved for resources. I call that the complacency-to-panic cycle.”
The probability blind spot
The basic problem, Gardner said, can be traced to human psychology. People tend to struggle with probability and long-term thinking. A global pandemic is an improbable event at any given moment in time; it’s only over the long term that such threats can be expected to manifest themselves.
“In other words, it’s a combination of our two blind spots,” Gardner said.
Gardner put it this way in a piece he wrote last year: if you’re told that there is a one per cent chance of something bad happening this year, you will discount the risk. But if that one per cent chance is constant from one year to the next, the “highly improbable” becomes “inevitable.”
Gardner also points to the “availability heuristic” and the idea that people will judge how common something is by how easily they can recall an example of something similar happening in the past.
People forget things — even the worst things
Anyone who was alive during the terrorist attacks of 9/11, for instance, might consider it more likely that terrorists could hijack an airplane. But there are few people left on the planet with any memory of the Spanish Flu.
And vigilance always fades over time. “If something bad happens to us, we suddenly perk up and pay a lot of attention to that bad thing and we are on the lookout for that bad thing,” Gardner said. “If the bad thing doesn’t manifest itself for a while, we gradually forget about the bad thing and go on about our day.”
All that human psychology informs political and institutional attention. “There’s human psychology that is making judgments about risks. The psychology informs public perception of risks. The public perception of risks informs politics. And the politics determines the resources that are available to prepare for risks,” Gardner said.
Government officials are only human. But if we can identify these blind spots, and if we now see the consequences of failing to prepare for possible disasters, our preparations don’t have to be limited to the next killer virus.
“I’m not worried about the next pandemic because I’m really pretty confident that our governments are going to be exquisitely sensitive to that threat. And they’re going to be that way for years to come,” Gardner said.
“The conversation should not be, ‘How do we prepare for the next pandemic’? The conversation should be, ‘How do we next best prepare for the next low-probability, high-consequence event that we’re not thinking about?'”
No political value in preemptive problem-solving
In his new book Value(s), former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney touches on a similar idea. He observes that resilience and preparedness were undervalued before the pandemic — and politicians are rarely rewarded for preemptively solving problems.
The most obvious analogue of another global pandemic is climate change, although that can no longer be considered a “low probability” threat. Dealing with that threat means mitigating the risk — by reducing greenhouse gas emissions — and protecting ourselves against the “once-in-a-century” storms and fires that are already happening.
Gardner threw out another suggestion: solar storms and the so-called Carrington Event of 1859, which fried telegraph lines. A similar geomagnetic disturbance now could wreak havoc on the communications technology that runs the modern world.
Preparing for such threats inevitably comes with upfront costs and the aftermath of this pandemic may offer some interesting insights into how much we are willing to do — and for how long. Maintaining a constant and robust supply of PPE and increasing domestic vaccine manufacturing would require resources.
A new definition of national security
The cost of preparation might always be far less than the cost of failing to prepare. But if the next pandemic is years or decades away, how long might it take for future Canadians to cut back or ignore such precautions?
For the sake of sustaining such efforts, Gardner said he wonders whether preparations for the next disaster could be included within a general understanding of national security — something politicians of all stripes are generally willing to fund.
He acknowledged that you could get carried away in trying to imagine all the awful things that could happen. But within reason, thinking about risk and resilience could better prepare governments and societies for whatever might come.
“There are two ways to approach it,” Gardner said. “Number one is, let’s have a conversation about those low-probability, high-consequence events that we’re not talking about — whether there are reasonable, cost-effective ways of mitigating those risks.
“Number two is just generally — how can we make our systems less fragile? How can we build more resilience into the system so that if we are hit with whatever it is that we’re hit by, we can respond to it well?”
Politics
The Earthquake Shaking BC Politics – TheTyee.ca
Six months from now Kevin Falcon is going to be staggering toward a catastrophic defeat for the remnants of the BC Liberals.
But what that will mean for the province’s political future is still up in the air, with the uncertainty increased by two shocking polls that show the Conservatives far ahead of BC United and only a few percentage points behind the NDP.
BC United is already toast, done in by self-inflicted wounds and the arrival of John Rustad and the Conservative Party of BC.
Falcon’s party has stumbled since the decision to abandon the BC Liberal brand in favour of BC United. The change, promoted by Falcon and approved by party members, took place a year ago this week. It was an immediate disaster.
That was made much worse when Rustad relaunched the B.C. Conservatives after Falcon kicked him out of caucus for doubting the basic science of climate change.
Falcon’s party had fallen from 33 per cent support to 19 per cent, trailing the Conservatives at 25 per cent. (The NDP has 42 per cent support.) That’s despite his repeated assurances that voters would quickly become familiar with the BC United brand.
BC United is left with almost no safe seats in this election based on the current polling.
Take Abbotsford West, where Mike de Jong is quitting after 30 years in the legislature to seek a federal Conservative nomination. It’s been a BC Liberal/United stronghold. In 2020 de Jong captured 46 per cent of the votes to the New Democrats’ 37 per cent and the Conservatives’ nine per cent.
But that was when the Conservatives were at about eight per cent in the polls, not 25 per cent.
Double their vote in this October’s election at the expense of the Liberals — a cautious estimate — and the NDP wins.
United’s prospects are even worse in ridings that were close in the 2020 election, like Skeena. Ellis Ross took it for the BC Liberals in 2020 with 52 per cent of the vote to the NDP’s 45 per cent.
But there was no Conservative candidate. Rustad has committed to running a candidate in every riding and the NDP can count on an easy win in Skeena.
It’s the same story across the province. The Conservatives and BC United will split the centre-right vote, handing the NDP easy wins and a big majority. And BC United will be fighting to avoid being beaten by the Conservatives in the ridings that are in play.
United’s situation became even more dire last week. A Liaison Strategies poll found the NDP at 38 per cent support, Conservatives at 34 per cent, United at 16 per cent and Greens at 11 per cent. That’s similar to a March poll from Mainstreet Research.
If those polls are accurate, BC United could end up with no seats. Voters who don’t want an NDP government will consider strategic voting based on which party has a chance of winning in their ridings.
Based on the Liaison poll, that would be the Conservatives. That’s especially true outside Vancouver and Vancouver Island, where the poll shows the Conservatives at 39 per cent, the NDP at 30 per cent and United lagging at 19 per cent. (The caveat about the polls’ accuracy is important. Curtis Fric and Philippe J. Fournier offer a useful analysis of possible factors affecting the results on Substack.)
And contributors will also be making some hard choices about which party gets their money. Until now BC United was far ahead of the Conservatives, thanks to its strong fundraising structure and the perception that it was the front-runner on the right. That’s under threat.
The polls also mark a big change in the NDP’s situation. This election looked like a cakewalk, with a divided centre-right splitting the vote and a big majority almost guaranteed. Most polls this year gave the New Democrats at least a 17 per cent lead over the Conservatives.
If the two recent polls prove accurate and that gap is much smaller, the NDP faces a tougher campaign challenge than anyone expected a few weeks ago.
Next: What’s behind the B.C. Conservatives’ surge?
Politics
Political longevity of Sunak smoking ban likely to outlast PM – BBC.com
Unless the opinion polls shift and shift quite a bit, Rishi Sunak knows his time left as prime minister might be running out.
But he is the instigator of a smoking plan with substantial, cross-party political support, which looks set to herald a sizeable social change.
And that cross-party support suggests it’s an idea with greater political longevity than he might have, because Labour wouldn’t scrap it if they win the election.
In other words, whatever happens, it is what some in politics call a legacy.
As I wrote here when Mr Sunak first set out his plans last autumn – in what he described at the time as “the biggest public health intervention in a generation” – this is a government seeking to nudge, or elbow, a societal shift along: the near end of smoking.
On Tuesday, Health Secretary Victoria Atkins said she hopes creating a smoke free generation will “spare thousands of young people from addiction and early death as well as saving billions of pounds for our NHS”.
What was once mainstream is already marginal. Now the attempt to near-eradicate it, over time.
This isn’t the end of this discussion: what we have seen so far are the early parliamentary stages. There is more to come before it becomes law.
So that is the big picture, potential social change stuff. What about the politics?
Nearly 60 Conservative MPs voted against Mr Sunak’s idea.
Yes, they had a free vote – they weren’t told how to vote – but they defied him nonetheless. The cabinet minister Kemi Badenoch among them.
Another 100-ish abstained. The cabinet minister Penny Mordaunt among them.
A source close to Ms Mordaunt told me that she abstained because “she was not a supporter of the bill. She has many objections to it. The practicality of it. The implementation and enforcement of it. But being a serving cabinet minister she thought voting against it would look more confrontational and posturing than abstaining would have been.”
Who could that possibly be a dig at? Ah, Kemi Badenoch.
And what do Ms Mordaunt and Ms Badenoch have in common? A splash of ambition.
They are both talked up by some as future Conservative leaders.
Read more about the smoking ban
When you look at the numbers, nearly half of Conservative MPs couldn’t bring themselves to endorse one of their leader’s flagship ideas of the last six months.
Which tells you something about the fractious nature of the Conservative parliamentary party, although not a lot that wasn’t pretty clear to the regular observer already.
Labour are already gleefully talking up that it is a good job they backed the idea or Mr Sunak would have lost.
And they are also publicly pondering what those opponents might do once the chance arises to change the ideas, to bolt on amendments.
But then again they would be defeated if those in favour keep backing the plan as it is.
When governments manage to latch on to a plan which goes with the grain of where a society is already heading, the might of the law can shove it along profoundly and, probably, permanently.
This idea – for now at least – looks like it might be one of those.
And, for all his political troubles, it is Mr Sunak who is its author.
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