Sending mixed messages

GETTING THE BIG PICTURE ON THOSE GLOBE-TROTTING PUBLIC SERVANTS

THOSE OFFICIALS WHO TRAVELLED ABROAD EVIDENTLY DID NOT THINK THAT IT WAS DANGEROUS, OTHERWISE THEY WOULD NOT HAVE GONE. — DE SOUZA

The furor over public officials travelling when public health advice has long been otherwise is largely focused on the double standard. Do as I say, not as I do. It is not a new problem, but no less aggravating for that reason.

There is another dimension that sheds light on the nature of public health orders, namely that they prohibit all kinds of activity that is, in those specific, particular circumstances, safe. That inescapable reality means that public officials often give public health advice that they do not believe is true, at least in part.

Those officials who travelled abroad evidently did not think that it was dangerous, otherwise they would not have gone. They concluded that if they followed the various protocols it was safe to travel. Yet they promote public health messages that appear to consider that very same travel to be dangerous.

It's a conflict between aggregates and particularities. To a certain degree, public health directives, aimed broadly as they are, are always at least partially false.

For example, my country parish borders the United States. If I were to travel across the border in my car, go directly to visit a friend at his rural home an hour away and return, encountering precisely that one person on that trip, it would certainly be less dangerous, pandemic-wise, than attending the daily press conferences of our various public health officials.

Public health orders are given in aggregate. So while the specific details of my potential trip would be safe, in aggregate it is judged better to prohibit all travel across the border. So I didn't make that trip at any time in 2020, not because I thought it would be dangerous, but because I accepted the regulations issued with the aggregate situation in mind.

Now consider not my potential trip, but the actual trip to a luxury resort in Jamaica of Dominique Baker in November 2020. She is the manager of the Office of Border and Travel Health at the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Her office works to keep infectious diseases out of Canada and to reduce health risk for travellers.

It is also of passing interest that her husband, Ryan, is also a civil servant. He is the director of strategic communications at the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness. Previously, he was director of communications for infectious disease, risk and emergency at Health Canada. For three months last fall, including the period when Dominique Baker was on vacation in Jamaica, he was a media adviser to Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada's chief public health officer.

The Baker household is thus amongst the top thousand Canadians in terms of knowledge about public health pandemic measures. She certainly knows, by multiple orders of magnitude, more than Rod Philips, Ontario's recently-resigned finance minister.

Yet she accepted an Air Canada junket to Jamaica, all-expenses paid, as she is, in her free time, also a social media “influencer” on matters of beauty, fashion and travel. Part of her deal was to promote how safe Air Canada flights are.

Indeed, in her posts from Jamaica, she specifically addressed how the “comprehensive precautions” meant the trip and the stay were safe. I have no reason to question that. In any case, she would know better than I would, and there is no indication that she, or anyone else, got sick.

Baker's case illustrates the issue perfectly. Her specific professional work is to tell people that it is dangerous, in general, to travel. I don't doubt that she believes that. She also judged — and is in a far better position to make this decision, with far more knowledge than almost anyone else — that the particularities of the Jamaica trip were safe. Indeed, that was largely the point of the whole exercise, to demonstrate to her followers that Air Canada could get you to Jamaica and back safely.

Maybe Baker is a hypocrite and elitist and believes that the rules do not apply to glamorous people like her. Perhaps, but I don't know her and you would have to demonstrate that. It is more than plausible that she is a public health expert, and her expertise made her confident that it was safe to go.

Should she have gone? Clearly not, as a pandemic is not the time for public health experts to make personal exemptions to the general guidance they give to the public. It causes confusion, giving rise to frustration and resentment, all of which undermines compliance with public health measures. Acting in particular is bad for public policy in general.

An alternative of course would be to tell the truth. Instead of saying that my entirely safe country drive across the border is dangerous, it would be more accurate to say that while it is safe, it is better in aggregate, for this period of time, to reduce all border traffic to a minimum.

If I was a glamorous social media influencer, I could get that message out.

INSTAGRAM - DOMINIQUE BAKER Dominique Baker's professional work is to tell people that in general it's dangerous to travel now, but she also judged it was safe to travel to Jamaica last fall on all-expenses paid Air Canada junket, Fr. Raymond de Souza writes.