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Theresa Tam, the country’s chief public health officer, took to the podium again on Tuesday and resurrected an old refrain from the first wave of the pandemic: “Let’s plank the curve, Canada.”
That messaging — along with the blunt lockdown it entailed for many parts of the country — may have eventually worked the first time, but it’s not working the second time around.
Federal pleas for Canadians to do their part — pare back all their outings to only the essentials and stay home as much as possible — is being ignored. The case count continues to climb.
It’s time for a different type of message — clear, consistent and backed up by deep, transparent, hyperlocal details that will help individuals and businesses make better decisions that don’t just preserve elements of their lifestyles, but protect lives at the same time.
“When given the facts, Canadians respond in a mature and responsible way,” said Perrin Beatty, who fears for the fate of the businesses he represents at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. “But what we have in many ways has been incoherent.”
We are not staying home, despite the daily suggestions from our leaders. Driving data collected by the C.D. Howe Institute from Apple maps show that in every main city in Canada except Vancouver, we are out and about even more now than we were in January. Mobility data from Google shows people going to work just a bit less than usual in most provinces. Retail and recreation trips haven’t changed much since we broke free this summer.
But we’re not getting much of an economic upside from all that moving around. A new report from CIBC says Canadians — especially those with high incomes — are sitting on heaps of savings, about $90 billion, waiting until the pandemic is over to spend it.
So we are in for a long, difficult winter of contagion and economic doldrums as neither the virus nor the recession is brought to heel. We are fraying.
The response from the federal government, premiers and public health authorities alike has been primarily to beg individuals to change their ways, accompanied by various degrees of new restraints at the regional level.
“We all need to double down to get the second wave under control,” Justin Trudeau said Tuesday, aiming his message specifically at young people, whose COVID-19 cases have been surging faster than other demographics.
But while we can presume goodwill on the part of most people and businesses to stick to the rules, that’s almost impossible to do when the rules change all the time and there is little consistency from town to town or day by day, let alone province to province.
Of course, local differences in demographics, economic diversity and the patterns of the virus require nuances at the local level. And the constantly improving scientific understanding of the coronavirus’s behaviour requires flexibility in public health guidelines.
The public understands that. But the public is not able to take all those details and apply them to their behaviour because there’s very little transparency. Without accurate and timely local information, a company can’t really judge how safe it is to stay open or how to best modify its business practices. A customer can’t tell whether it’s safe to venture out, or where she should go to avoid contagion.
If political and public health authorities are going to put the onus on individuals and companies, they also need to come clean with us, and share with us what they know so that we can mitigate the risk with intelligence.
Regular, detailed updates on where local outbreaks are and how they’re spreading should be the norm, not something media have to chase down and investigate. Analysis from public health authorities should be out in the open, not something locked down by nondisclosure agreements or buried by politicians.
If certain neighbourhoods or certain types of living conditions or certain occupations or certain behaviours carry higher risks, we need to know all that. And once we have those details in hand, we should know what to do with them, and be able to anticipate what kind of policy reaction might follow. Consumers and businesses alike would then be able to adjust with efficiency and health and safety in mind.
Beatty has been strategizing with the business community, co-authoring a public letter along with five other associations representing a huge part of Canada’s private sector, urging a risk-management approach to the pandemic rather than a reactive “shutdown-and-write-a-cheque” approach that kills businesses indiscriminately.
A risk-management approach would see targeted closures based on solid data and targeted government support for companies in collapse, but not a blanket one-size-fits-all shutdown, Beatty says. If premiers are tempted to close restaurants, for example, they need to show the public that restaurants are systematically spreading the virus and not just poor behaviour by some people in some places. If poor behaviour is the issue, then that should be the target.
“We have to have the much better information.”
For some public health authorities, even a small risk is too much, and that’s a debate worth having. But without full details and data available to the public, the public can’t buy into that reasoning and govern themselves accordingly, even if they wanted to. We can’t mitigate risk unless we understand fully what the risk is.