Transparency is key to trust
The rules for living in a pandemic world change often and dramatically. White becomes black, acceptable becomes unacceptable and so on.
In Canada, masks went from being not necessary, and possibly even harmful, to a measure so important to stopping the spread of the coronavirus that governments have mandated their use in many circumstances.
The public health officials who advise politicians on these matters didn’t just up and change their minds about masks or, heaven forbid, were wrong in their early advice. No, we were told, it’s the “science” that changed. No matter the new measure or change to an old one, that’s always the gist of the message.
The public, for the most part, has been willing to go along with this. After all, we’ve never faced COVID-19 before, so it makes sense that new information about the virus and how best to protect people will emerge.
More than seven months into the crisis, we’ve all gained experience — some of it at very high cost, with Canada’s official COVID-19 death toll ticking past 10,000 on Tuesday.
Governments are still constantly changing the pandemic protocols: what people can do, where they can do it and who they can do it with. But now when Ontario announces a new public health measure people want to know why. Whether it’s banning Halloween trick-or-treating, indoor dining and gyms in hotspots, people want details. They want to know what metrics were used to make those decisions and what science backs up those metrics.
That’s perfectly understandable given all the confusing and contradictory messages they’ve heard in recent weeks and how increasingly arbitrary some of these supposedly sciencebased measures seem to be.
When the Ford government decides that indoor hip hop and ballroom dance classes are safe in hotspots but yoga classes aren’t safe it is hard not to think the province has taken a deep dive into the arbitrary.
Ontarians watched Toronto’s mayor plead with the province for tighter restrictions on some businesses to stem rising case counts. Then they watched mayors in Halton region, also experiencing rising numbers, beg the province not to impose those same restrictions on them.
From the earliest days of the pandemic, Premier Doug Ford, like other leaders, framed pandemic restrictions as necessary based solely on what science and medical experts say.
But, of course, there was always a lot of risk assessment and political choice in deciding what science and medical advice to follow, how thoroughly and how quickly. People are seeing that more clearly now and Ford himself is being more frank about the calculations he’s making.
This week, Ford said he’ll always listen to the science and the doctors, but that he also listens to small business owners. “We have to have a happy balance.”
In hindsight, it would have been better for everyone if Ford had been clearer about that from the start and people weren’t left trying to parse out what’s behind the growing collection of contradictory decisions.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau summed up what pretty much everyone is thinking when he said the pandemic “really sucks.”
He went on to say that no one wants to be here and we’re not all going to be perfect all the time. The same is certainly true for governments. But it’s never too late to get better.
The Ford government has every reason to expect the vast majority of Ontarians will continue to follow the rules, whatever they may be on a given day. But it also has a responsibility to be more transparent with the public about the metrics it’s using for pandemic restrictions and what health and economic balancing calculations it’s making along the way. Above all, the government should be able to demonstrate that it’s applying its data and policies in a fair and consistent manner.
That’s the only way to keep the public’s trust as we head into what’s bound to be a difficult winter.