Please share the unvarnished truth

Of late, I have found myself yearning for this time a year ago when my biggest problems included finding new things to say about the prime minister and the SNC-Lavalin scandal. Remember then? Such easy times (well, for most of us anyway).

Instead, we now spend our time and invest our emotional energies watching the grim, daily tally announced by politicians and public health officials of new diagnosed COVID-19 infections and the deaths this sickness has caused. As body counts rise, so too do our feelings of stress, anxiety and uncertainty. We worry for loved ones with whom we don’t live and can’t hug. We worry for ourselves and how so many of us will make it through financially. We are seized by the stretched-out, on-andon-ness of it all.

Until now, our leaders have focused on the immediate must-dos that this novel coronavirus has dictated: banning public gatherings, closing schools, sending us home, imploring us to continue to stay home, creating economic rescue packages for those who do not have the privilege of working from home. But over time, this will transition — from reacting to crisis, to becoming routine.

And as our present situations become the new normal, the daily briefings cannot continue to simply be about updates to the numbers infected. People will become fatigued at the meaninglessness of this information over the next eight to 12 weeks (if indeed this is going to last eight to 12 weeks).

The problem is, we don’t know, and most of us aren’t being given even an educated guess about timelines. While officials in British Columbia have released some early modelling to give us at least a vague picture of where we sit on the now infamous “curve,” it has been an outlier. Ontario followed suit Friday amid questions of why it hadn’t happened earlier. The prime minister’s comments on the matter have been a soliloquy of incoherence.

Then there are questions about testing, to which answers have been given, which feel incomplete: Why aren’t we able to use the rapid response tests Canadian manufacturers are shipping to other countries? Why can’t we come up with a consistent protocol for who gets tested, and how quickly? Why don’t we know more about the personal circumstances of those afflicted? Age? Region? Underlying health issues? Why don’t we have a clearer picture of the amount of contact-tracing underway? Without this context, the daily scroll of new cases cannot be put into context.

Thus far, polling shows Canadians have given their individual provincial governments — as well at the federal government — very high marks for the way each has handled the outbreak. But research soon to be released by the Angus Reid Institute will also show that a significant chunk of Canadians also say their governments are not providing enough information to fully understand the situation. Governments must pay close attention to this message. They have enjoyed high levels of public trust these last weeks. It is a rare gift, and it is not unconditional.

I do not envy the decision-makers who must weigh the mental health and economic impacts of levelling with Canadians about what they are facing. But in order to have the continued buy-in of a nation around the extraordinary changes people have been asked (sometimes told) to make so suddenly in their lives, transparency is key. If there are fears the unvarnished truth will prompt a sense of hopelessness or a massive wave of depression, then I would implore our capable leaders to deal with that, in the ways they have dealt with other realities thus far. Communicate that a plan exists. Offer reassurance. Provide details.

This unprecedented time has caused matters of pure politics to (mostly) take a back seat to the priority of pulling together in one direction. But this shared sense of purpose, these shared values, these common duties and reliance on one another to do the right things … it’s a very delicate ecosystem. A failure to recognize that Canadians require fuller disclosure could too easily destroy it.