Towards a New Normal
Against this backdrop, a nation that had increasingly come to view politicians with cynicism while rejecting expert knowledge in favour of memes they’d seen on social media did something remarkable: it turned to these same leaders for guidance, and trusted in what they were being told:
More explicitly, people reacted positively to the combination of reassurance and action as Canada’s provincial and federal governments dealt with the dual crises of trying to curb the deadliest health threat to darken our communities since the flu pandemic of 1918, while propping up the millions of households affected by an economy in sudden freefall.
As for Justin Trudeau, the prime minister whose personal approval had been mired at an anemic 30-ish percent for more than a year? That rating jumped 21 points as Canadians (even Conservative voters) offered support for his handling of the crisis.
It could be easy to dismiss such findings, to suggest they are the result of a numbed population too busy grappling with all that’s happened to focus on or adequately scrutinize the ways in which their leaders have performed.
But that would assume the collective Canadian nose for propaganda had been temporarily disabled, a symptom if not of the coronavirus itself, then all the suffering and uncertainty it has wrought. Indeed, even if our leaders haven’t been getting it exactly right all the time—and they haven’t—the general perception appears to be that their actions haven’t been making things worse.
Contrast this with the way Americans feel about how their president and state leaders have tackled the COVID-19 crisis:
After the October election, so tender were federal-provincial relations that Prime Minister Trudeau eschewed a first ministers meeting in favour of one-on-ones with the premiers. But the issues that made those relationships shaky have been put aside to fight this disaster with a united front. There are no daily press conferences where premiers and the PM openly antagonize one another. There is instead an attempt—even in moments of disagreement—to keep the conversations civil.
The outstanding question is the extent to which this spirit of collective co-operation will last. A return to “normal”—or at least a path to recovery—in our health and economic lives will also bring with it a return of national policy issues that never really went away, but merely fell to the bottom of our priority lists.
Will Canada emerge from this crisis a gentler, more circumspect nation? Will we decide that the issues that felt so divisively unsolvable weren’t so impossible after all? It would not be the first time that epic tragedy and suffering had produced positive change and innovation. While we can’t predict the future, we’ll be measuring those outcomes as Canadians live through them.
Contributing Writer Shachi Kurl is Executive Director of the Angus Reid Institute, a national not-for-profit research foundation based in Vancouver.