2020 HINDSIGHT IN HINDSIGHT. WATSON,

The saying is that “hindsight is 20-20” but in his contribution to this page's “2020 Hindsight” series Matthew Lau reminded us it isn't, actually. We have only incomplete understanding of why things happened how they did and therefore — progressives beware! — even less insight about how we might change them in ways more pleasing to us.

Asked to write about what had especially struck them in 2020, contributors were invited to roam beyond the COVID-related. Peter Menzies wrote about how, given the recent scandal involving the New York Times' revelations regarding Montreal's Pornhub internet site, Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault may want to reconsider his desire to regulate internet content, while Richard Owens warned that news and social media are thin gruel and “likes and retweets are as addictive and nourishing as a sugar diet.” Peter Foster described the “Virtue Kabuki” Amazon went through to please environmental activists. When one per cent of “employee stakeholders” wanted the company to reveal its carbon footprint to a nosy NGO and 70 per cent of shareholders didn't, well, you know who won: one-to-70, the stakeholders have it.

But of course COVID was most contributors' preoccupation.

The good news was — an overused word this year but an apt one — the resilience of the vast majority of Canadians. Peter Menzies paid tribute to the “quiet courage of the elderly who despite their frailty bore their risk, fear, loneliness and at times illness with the sort of mettle to which all of us … can only aspire.” Laura Jones, from the CFIB, noted that 50 per cent of her members said they were extremely stressed — you own a small business at a time of lockdown, no kidding — but kept that under wraps. What impressed her most were the notes and signs she saw in store windows that “expressed the importance of doing the right thing for the community and encouraged people to stay safe … (T)he streets were eerily empty but the community was still there.” Even Bruce Pardy's observation that we were quick to bow down to the authority, not so much of scientists, but of public officials invoking “the science,” whether the science was settled or not, speaks in a way to our good behaviour, or at least our sense of civic duty.

Michael Smart reminded us that an infectious disease is literally the textbook case of a non-private good, one where a person's actions affect not just him or her self but others, too. A crucial statistic most of us had not heard of before March was the R-value, the number of other people an infected person infects. In dealing with such non-private goods, “capable government” is crucial.

Even imperfect foresight suggests that just how capable our governments were in 2020 will be a continuing object of hindsight in 2021 and beyond. Philip Cross detailed how “tech” had a much better year than “gov.” Tech gave us Zoom, Amazon and vaccines. Governments, by contrast, were often “heavy-handed, lead-footed and wrong-headed.”

That may be a little harsh. Laura Jones noted how governments did get vaccines approved in record time — not by cutting corners, we all hope, but by doing things in parallel rather than in sequence. Governments also quickly figured out how to pay doctors for distance consultations, which need to become standard in health care.

Still, on balance, as Richard Owens put it, private 2020 was better than public 2020.

That's a problem. If people are to follow the new social norms that are our best hope in self-policing a pandemic, they need to trust that whatever their government is recommending will actually help. Governments therefore need to be both sparing of advice and dead certain the advice they give is correct. Mislead me once, shame on you. Mislead me twice, etc, etc.

As for the future, even hindsight that is much less than 20-20 reveals that many of our governments made serious mistakes in how they addressed the crisis. Perhaps that was inevitable: they're only human. But then, as Bill Robson asked, why have so many people concluded from this difficult year that these very same imperfect governments should be entrusted with large-scale transformations of how our society works? They should be more prepared, yes, as Jack Mintz emphasized, but re-do the world? That's magical thinking.

One theme that came through in several pieces was the need, if we are to have good public decision-making, of open, vigorous debate. We were all operating in a fog here. This was a new virus. Exactly which policy mix correctly balanced prevention and social disruption was not written in the sky (even if many people seemed to see it there). It is not seditious to ask what the ethical and scientific bases are for any policy and to point out when answers are unpersuasive. No doubt some readers will disagree with George Fallis's conclusion, elsewhere on this page, that the countries that locked down quickest and best have shown the best COVID numbers or that the economies that were hit hardest have bounced back most quickly, thus displaying that economies are resilient, too.

That's fine. Disagreement is a free society's way. In the pandemic's first days many of us probably showed too much deference to deciders. To insist they justify what they propose is a good resolution for 2021.