Big choices loom in a world of instant backlash
Are the candidates really ready? Lisa Van Dusen asks.
Much of the prognostication attention during the first week of the federal election campaign was on the cautionary tale served up for the incumbent prime minister by the Nova Scotia surprise, delivered in the form of a poll-defying, stunning-upset majority won by Tim Houston's provincial Conservatives.
The more instructive stunning upset for Justin Trudeau — and all the candidates, for that matter — might be the surprise that unfolded 10,000 kilometres away, as the Taliban staged the denouement of Afghanistan's experiment in democracy with a remarkably frictionless takeover of the country.
Aside from the obvious human rights and geopolitical implications of the endgame in Afghanistan, it's also a reminder of the transformative effects of time on policy, and how decisions based on emotional responses including fear, revenge, anger, panic and hate can produce unintended consequences. In a global political context that produced the U.S. presidency of Donald Trump, the mess of Brexit, China's hostage diplomacy and other outcomes generated by fear, revenge, anger and panic, the question of leadership takes on new dimensions.
Heads of government and elected officials at all levels are currently required to make decisions about a deadly pandemic whose most serious epidemiological, economic and societal consequences and implications may not be known for another 20 years. That exceptional context has made all the elements that influence problem-solving and decision-making — from instinct to consultation to damage mitigation to every other input listed in every Top 10 management-guru checklist — more consequential than they would be otherwise. That includes delegating, and the competence and intelligence of the people around you.
As prime minister, Trudeau has proven to be both more mature than his opponents might have hoped and less careful at times than his advisers would have wished. His lapses in judgment
(The Taliban takeover) is a reminder of the transformative effects of time on policy.
on conflicts of interest, his handling of the blackface backstory and his choice in subcontinental travel attire have delighted opponents and bewildered supporters. At the same time, his handling of Canada's interests at the G7, G20 and in the bilateral relationship with the United States — especially on NAFTA — has defied the predictions of the critics who dismissed him as a pretty boy before the 2015 election.
In this election, questions of judgment are playing out at the usual levels of how a campaign is run and what it reveals about the leader; what that leader says on an hourly basis about policy and problem-solving and what it says about them; and, on an unprecedentedly important level, the life-and-death choices being made about how to contain a pandemic whose systemic impacts, like those of a war, will be revealed over decades, not weeks.
The difference in approach to what has become the ludicrously politicized question of vaccine mandates between Trudeau and Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole — with O'Toole, representing the party most associated with anti-masker, anti-vaxxer sentiment, threading the needle by endorsing vaccines but not mandates; and Trudeau, as the Liberal head of government responsible for outcomes, doubling down on mandates — has underscored the degree to which decision-making, even in a public health crisis, can be swayed by shortterm considerations.
Democracy seems so dysfunctional in the United States these days because decisions that should be made based on science, logic and reason are being disproportionately influenced by the power of social media-amplified, propaganda-driven voices. Both Congressional intractability and state-level democracy degradation are being rationalized by deference to those voices.
Whatever happens on Sept. 20, all the fiscal and management choices demanded by the epic, generational problems of climate change, digital disruption, health-care reform and democracy protection, among others, will require longterm thinking, in a world of instant backlashes.