THE AGE OF UNREASON
We want to believe facts matter, but the truth is, they often don’t. And now that we know that, what do we about it?
Four stories that flipped the script
When marijuana becomes legal in Canada next year, it will be mainly because Justin Trudeau had a change of mind in 2012.
Same-sex marriage and the right to physician-assisted death — they’re now the law of the land in Canada because politicians, judges and yes, citizens too, changed their minds.
But changes of mind get a bad rap in politics — they’re usually linked to promise-breaking, weakness of conviction or disloyalty to the cause or the team.
That’s even more true in this world of instant opinions, Twitter spats and polarized debates, when taking the time to reason through an issue seems like a quaint relic of another century, and the middle ground seems, well, boring. You’re not likely to see people on a TV political panel in 2017 saying to each other: “You know, you’ve convinced me I’m wrong.” And it’s hard to gain clicks on social media with a measured, nuanced view from both sides of a debate. Yet it can happen. People can move from one side of an issue to another. Voters do it all the time. How does it happen? Sometimes it’s a sudden conversion; sometimes the shifts in thinking emerge over time. It’s commonly assumed that people get more conservative as they get older, that when they change their minds, it’s to shed their old, left-wing convictions. But that’s not always the case: changing of minds works both ways. What follows are a few stories of Canadians who did a 180-degree shift in recent years on some big political issues — proof that while polarization may be rampant south of the border, it is neither an inevitable nor a permanent condition in Canada. At least not yet. Five short years ago, Trudeau was not a fan of legalized pot.
As he wandered around the 2012 Liberal policy convention in Ottawa — the same one in which a majority of party members voted in favour of legalization — Trudeau was a dissenting voice.
He told one interviewer that marijuana “disconnects you a little bit from the world” and that it was “not good for your health.” For those reasons alone, Trudeau said he wasn’t in favour of any measures that could make pot use more widespread.
“I don’t know that it’s entirely consistent with the society we’re trying to build,” Trudeau said in an interview that still lives on YouTube, where it’s immediately clear he hasn’t had his run-for-leadership makeover: he still sports a moustache and the long, unruly hair.
By the end of 2012, a lot of things had changed for Trudeau — beyond his appearance. He had changed his mind about running for Liberal leader, officially launching his campaign in October, and he was also starting to see that legalization was better than the decriminalization option he’d long favoured.
Today, Trudeau and his advisers trace the shift to a meeting with two women in his office in November of that year, who armed him with some of the pro-legalization arguments that he’s still using today — now, as prime minister. The two women were Kelly Coulter and Andrea Matrosovs, then representing what was known as the women’s alliance of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).
Coulter, who now lives in Victoria, remembers the meeting well, and is heartened to hear that Trudeau traces his conversion to this encounter.
“I actually saw the ‘aha’ moment,” Coulter says. It had been an emotional meeting in Trudeau’s tiny Parliament Hill office; the three of them talked about their own personal experience with marijuana. Trudeau talked about his mother using pot, and his brother, Michel, who had been charged with possession not long before he died. (Trudeau has subsequently told the story publicly of how his father used connections to get the charges dropped so that his son didn’t have a criminal record.)
Coulter told Trudeau flatly that decriminalization would not keep gangs and organized crime out of the marijuana business. “Al Capone would have loved it if alcohol had only been decriminalized,” she said — a line she often used when talking to politicians.
“I saw the light go on in his eyes,” Coulter said. “He was seeing this as a politician, realizing ‘I can sell this,’ ” she recalled.
Trudeau could see how this argument would blunt Conservative attacks on him as being soft on crime; with legalization, he could simultaneously seem liberal about marijuana but conservative about gangs and criminals. It helped persuade Trudeau that legalization, would be the best way for the government to regulate its use and keep it safe, especially for kids.
Still, it would be a while before Trudeau would make that change of mind public. Throughout the Liberal leadership debates in the winter of 2013, it was candidate Joyce Murray who most strongly advocated for legalization. It wouldn’t be until July of 2013, when he was travelling through B.C. as the new Liberal leader, that Trudeau would announce he was in favour of legalization. Roughly four years since that declaration, the legislation is now moving through Parliament, and marijuana sales and consumption should be legal by next summer.
Cannabis legalization isn’t the only tough, polarizing issue that the Trudeau government has tackled. No sooner had the Trudeau government been sworn in when it was forced, thanks to a Supreme Court of Canada ruling, to come up with a new law on medical assistance in dying. It meant that one of the hardest, most emotionally charged issues for families, physicians and caregivers got plunged into politics, where people are always looking for black-and-white distinctions.
Certainly many doctors felt they had to pick sides, and the law has been written to take account of doctors who refuse to help patients choose death. One physician who made the journey from “against” to “for” on assisted dying was James Downar, a critical care and palliative care expert with the University Health Network in Toronto.
Downar tells the story of his conversion quite publicly, to encourage physicians as they face what for many of them is an agonizing decision. Downar even wrote up a kind of guide for doctors thinking through their positions on medically assisted dying, which appeared in a 2014 issue of HealthCare Papers, a publication for people interested in medical and health issues.
Downar talks about how he came out of school — the “doctor factory,” as he calls it — with pretty standard opinions on whether he should be helping patients end their lives. “I was taught that it was immoral to end a life intentionally, because it was contrary to the healing culture of medicine and forbidden by the Hippocratic oath,” Downar writes.
But as he started practising his profession, he began to see the issue in not so simple, abstract terms. Downar saw patients suffering in their final hours — situations in which ending their lives seemed to be the greater mercy than keeping them alive and his convictions intact.
He also started to pore through medical research that also tested his opposition to physician-assisted dying. Gradually, Downar concluded that it was his duty to come to the “for” side of the debate.
“Medical school had taught me to be prepared to reconsider my diagnosis when things weren’t evolving the way I expected,” he wrote in HealthCare Papers.
The final step, the one that turned him into an advocate, was seeing the video that Donald Low, the microbiologist who headed up the fight against SARS, left behind when he died in 2013 of a brain tumour. Low, who had been a boss and a mentor to Downar, made the video eight days before he died — an impassioned call for assisted dying, literally made on a deathbed. After seeing the video, Downar signed on as a physician adviser for Dying with Dignity. His article in HealthCare Papers contains some useful tips for doctors thinking of changing sides — many revolving around respect, not just for facts, but for the emotion of the issue, too.
“Do not stoop to personal attacks, even when they are used against you. This issue is too important,” Downar writes. “Keep it logical . . . When new data arises, do not ignore or suppress it.”
Some of those tips could also be useful in other, polarized and emotional debates, too.
It’s often the political right that’s accused of ignoring science, of putting ideology ahead of evidence and ignoring inconvenient facts. But it can happen on the left side of the political spectrum too, as Rachel Gouin discovered.
Gouin works in government relations in Ottawa these days, but she once worked for an anti-poverty organization that was fiercely opposed to genetically modified organisms — GMOs, as they’re called. (Because Gouin does not want to single out ex-colleagues or the organization for criticism, it remains unnamed in this article.)
Gouin hadn’t thought too much about GMOs before starting her job as a fundraiser with the organization, and simply adopted the company line. She was learning quickly on the job, though, and soon was organizing events around the idea of banning all genetically modified food. One fundraiser Gouin organized in Montreal still sticks in her mind.
“Having no scientific background, I was repeating key messages from the campaign and responding to questions with information I had gleaned from colleagues and materials circulated in the office,” Gouin said.
At the end of her presentation, she was approached by a scientist. He told her she was not giving the facts about the technology she’d mentioned in her remarks. “He was not angry, but wanted to express his disagreement with the organization’s position.”
Gouin and her colleagues dismissed his criticism, writing him off as “lacking in critical-thinking skills,” as they liked to say. But as time wore on, Gouin was increasingly bothered by the idea that she might be spreading misinformation. She started digging deeper into the organization’s anti-GMO research and found it lacking in rigour. Gouin realized that even though the cause was noble (protecting small farmers) the science was off.
She wouldn’t be the only one to make that call — Bill Nye, “the Science Guy,” also did a major rethink of his opposition to GMOs and announced in 2016 that he couldn’t keep speaking out against them. Nye, who’s best known for his popular PBS show that teaches science to kids, said he was persuaded by the evidence, but also tipped over the edge by the unscientific, conspiratorial nature of the antiGMO movement. Gouin felt much the same.
“The line for me was whether or not that meant denying what science was saying about GMOs,” Gouin said. She spoke up at work meetings a couple of times, but ultimately realized it was wiser to simply change jobs. The experience changed more than her mind about GMOs — it changed how she comes to other views, too.
“I do measure my opinions more. I want to hear the view of scientists,” Gouin said. “I no longer side with lone-voice contrarians and hold them up as courageous in the face of some kind of corporate and political conspiracy to silence their dissent.” Changing her own mind made Gouin realize how hard it can be for others. “It really opened my eyes to the ways in which even smart, educated people can become so strongly attached to positions that they will not reconsider them in light of evidence to the contrary.”
Michael Coren may be one of Canada’s best-known mind-changers, who now writes frequently for this newspaper. Once a prominent voice in the right-wing, conservative commentariat, with multiple platforms in the Sun media network and the Catholic Register, Coren experienced a profound, life-changing reversal in his opposition to same-sex marriage.
It started in 2013, when he watched anti- gay zealots haranguing John Baird, then foreign affairs minister, for speaking out against Uganda’s proposed death penalty for homosexuality. Coren, who had been an ardent Roman Catholic since joining the church in the 1980s, realized he simply couldn’t reconcile his religious or spiritual beliefs with people who held such virulent views against other human beings.
By 2014, Coren was writing a column in the Toronto Sun, headlined “I was wrong,” about same-sex marriage. By 2015, he’d left the Roman Catholic church and converted to Anglicanism.
It was a costly shift of opinion — abandoning his views meant the loss of some of his columnist jobs and many lucrative speaking engagements. As Coren said in an interview, it was probably not all that timely a decision either — Donald Trump’s rise in the United States has injected some new energy, not to mention income, into right-wing commentary. Had he held on to his old views, Coren might be making a good deal of money right now.
“My timing, in a way, couldn’t be worse,” he laughed.
Coren wrote a book about his conversion, the reaction and what it all taught him about life, politics and changing one’s mind. It’s titled Epiphany: A Christian’s change of heart and mind over same-sex marriage.
In the process of changing his own mind, Coren has learned a little bit about how to go about changing others. It makes no sense, he says, to yell at people or call them names, or imply that their current view is stupid. Far too often these days, Coren said, that’s the style of political debate and probably the reason that things get polarized in the first place.
“You’ve got to be respectful and you don’t scream at people who disagree with you,” he said. “And if people are screaming at you, you don’t respond.” While changing one’s mind may be an intensely personal process, making arguments personal rarely works.
Coren laughs at suggestions that changes of mind are a sign of intellectual weakness or a lack of conviction. “There’s nothing flimsy or flabby about watching, listening and learning and changing because of that,” Coren said. “I could argue that not changing is rather strange.”
In fact, Coren has a bit of a warning for people who are considering changing their minds on one issue or another — switching sides is addictive. Once you start opening your views to new thinking, you may not be able to stop.
“I’ve changed my view on most moral and sexual issues, certainly on assisted dying,” Coren says. On abortion, an extremely polarizing issue for the church and politics, Coren has also switched his views. “You do develop a certain flexibility . . . If you make the leap of empathy on one issue, you do tend to empathize on others.”
Still, it’s rarely easy. Walking away from long-held views may mean losing old friends, colleagues, income or status. If you’re a politician, it could mean losing votes or elections and facing accusations of weakness and inconsistency.
That’s probably why we don’t hear stories that often of transformed views in politics, which is a shame — because anyone who wants to change the world for the better is going to have to change some minds, sometimes starting with their own mind. sdelacourt@bell.net