PM still selling pandemic safety, but are we buying?
The next crucial weeks in the COVID-19 crisis would be a lot easier if Canadians really were the people in the old joke about the swimming pool.
The joke: “How do you get a bunch of Canadians out of a swimming pool?” Punchline: “You say: ‘Canadians, please get out of the pool.’ ”
While medical science is scrambling to find something to save us from this virus, the more pressing need right now is to find something to save us from ourselves.
There is no vaccination against risky behaviour — and unlike the COVID-19 vaccine, one won’t arrive in 2021. So politicians and public health leaders are currently plunged into an instant, on-the-job course in mass behavioural science for a pandemic-weary population.
Justin Trudeau, back on his front step on Friday to address Canadians, more or less admitted that he and other political leaders are figuring this out as they go along. What makes it worse, Trudeau acknowledged several times, is that the public is sick of hearing from him and other COVID-19 lecturers.
“I don’t want to be here, you don’t want me to be here — we’re all sick and tired of COVID-19,” Trudeau said. He talked of how all he had right now was his voice and his position to tell Canadians what they didn’t want to hear, from someone who uncomfortably finds himself as 2020’s holidaywrecker.
Yes, Friday was the day for the prime minister to say that Christmas, at least as we usually know it, was “right out of the question.”
Deputy public health chief Howard Njoo was similarly, wearily candid this week in an interview with the Star’s Tonda MacCharles, explaining how COVID-19 fatigue had become the X-factor in the prolonged management of this crisis.
“Part of my learning was that we never anticipated that, let’s say even with the wearing of masks and so on, we never anticipated we’d all be doing it for so long,” Njoo said.
Trudeau also admitted on Friday that things were easier in the spring, when political leaders could stand at their podiums and wield the “blunt object” of a mass shutdown.
Now all the political practitioners are relying on a mixed and varied bag of tricks: a bit of fear here, a bit of hope there, and a “social contract” in Quebec that metes out a little taste of Christmas for those willing to pay the price of quarantine beforehand and no New Year’s afterwards.
From the outset of this pandemic, politicians have had to radically up their game in public persuasion. In normal times, governments don’t really ask a lot of citizens, beyond paying taxes and voting occasionally. Voting is even optional.
But the demands on the public are considerable during a pandemic: stay at home, wash your hands, wear a mask and,
oh yes, for some of you, shut down your business and homeschool your children.
This is quite a reach for politicians who are more accustomed to talking to citizens about all the great things they’re going to do for them. It’s an even bigger stretch when you’re trying to coax civil compliance out of a public that already believes it’s been asked to sacrifice too much for too long.
One principle that seems to be guiding Trudeau is the idea of voluntary compliance. The prime minister repeatedly insists that he doesn’t want to bring down the hammer of emergency legislation and on Friday, he spoke about how he
was averse to making it mandatory for people to sign up for the federal COVID-19-tracing app.
“It is really important for me that it be voluntary,” he said.
Trudeau never really explains why he is so adamant on the voluntary aspect of the shutdown, so it’s not clear whether it’s a strategy or a principle, or a bit of both. One would assume that the government as a whole is looking to its previous limited experiments in behavioural change — antismoking campaigns, for instance — for some clues on getting citizens to cease self-destructive acts.
For years, politicians have been borrowing from the marketing and advertising world
for clues on how to speak to citizens. (I wrote a whole book on that, as it happens.)
But marketers rarely have to make the big and difficult pitches that the politicians in Canada are having to make these days. Nor do they have to contend with an audience that is fatigued to the extent that Canadians are right now with COVID-19. Few sellers need to be this relentless and few buyers are this hostile to the marketplace.
It’s all a long way from the old joke about getting compliant Canadians to exit the swimming pool. But no one is trying jokes at the COVID-19 podium — at least, not yet.