Soap Box ISSUE 3: Trust Me, Bro

Trying to figure out what I wanted to talk about in the latest iteration of the Soap Box blog has proven to be a difficult task. That’s why its taken me until now, on the flight home from my vacation in the Dominican Republic, to really understand where my mind was. In these Soap Box blogs, I try to think of a topic checks two boxes. Number one; something that’s relevant to current events. I like to try and tie it into hot button issues or pressing matters in Canadian, and sometimes global, society. Number two; something I’m passionate about and would be willing to provide my deepest, personal perspective on. You would think those two premises intersect extremely frequently, but that’s not always the case. But after reading about the recent headlines concerning government interference in the RCMP investigation into the Portapique mass shooting and thinking about the headlines I’ve seen over the past few years, those two fundamental Soap Box premises collided. This month’s Soap Box, and I know I missed last month so consider this one a double-whammy, is about trust.

Trust is finnicky. I recall the “crumpled paper” analogy that I first heard as a kid. It goes something like this:

Trust is like a piece of paper. At first, it’s pristine; flat, neat, and clear of any ridges or imperfections. But if you crumple it up, that piece of paper gets all smushed, wrinkled, and maybe even torn. Now try to turn that poor little paper ball back into the pristine sheet you started with. That’s probably not possible without some serious effort. Similar to trust. Once your trust is broken, can it ever go back to how it was before? Again, probably not without some serious effort.

I remember hearing this saying a kid and having my mind completely blown. I had never thought of it like that, and I thought it was perfect. It was true. Trust is fragile. Trust is finnicky. Trust is easy to break and hard to build. Now that analogy was probably bred from the notions of interpersonal trust aka the trust between individuals. Maybe you lied to your parents and got caught and now, no matter what you do or how many times you’ve told them the truth, they don’t believe you. That papers been crumpled. Maybe you lied to your friend about being too busy to hang out so you could hang out with someone else, and they saw you and now, turns out they don’t want to be friends with a liar. That papers been crumpled. Of course, that trust can be rebuilt and regained, but not overnight and not without substantial effort. It may take years before your parents believe what you say, and it might take months for your friend to forgive you. Don’t worry. I know what youre thinking and no, this issue of Soap Box is not devoted to righting the wrongs I’ve made. What draws me to this analogy now is that I think it also perfectly describes a larger sense of trust: the trust been people and the institutions and officials that shape the world they live in.

That trust, specifically the fragility of that trust, has been put on display since the COVID-19 pandemic started. That’s not to say that that trust was never strained before the pandemic, because it certainly was, but the pandemic definitely exacerbated those tensions and inflamed them to a point where it’s fair to question if that piece of paper can ever be uncrumpled. Will Canadians ever be able to trust their politicians again? I mean, it’s probably safe to also ask if they ever did. After all, politics is a dirty business. But how about the institutions that are designed to protect us, shape the world we live in, and set the standards for how we coexist? Public health agencies, the courts, the media, experts their fields, have all come under significant fire over the last decade and whatever trust citizens had in these institutions has been eroded. Now it’s vital to note that these institutions, politicians, and experts have not done themselves any favours. There’s been a fair number of scandals over the last decade that would have definitely helped to justify any mistrust in them Canadians may have had. But there’s also been a coordinated, concentrated, and concerted attempt to undermine these institutions, politicians, and experts for malicious purposes. It’s almost become a “chicken-or-the-egg” scenario. What came first: the scandal or the manipulation of the narrative?

I think a seminal moment for the conversation around trust was when, former senior advisor to President Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway pushed back against criticism of then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s claims about the size of Trump’s inauguration day crowd by saying Spicer presented “alternative facts”. It felt like from that point on, truth was a matter of opinion. While his attacks on the media and established politicians preceded the pandemic, COVID-19 provided the former President with an opportunity to pit the American people against medical experts and, in turn, against experts as a whole. It's pretty safe to assume that Trump wasn’t intentionally trying to destroy American’s trust in these institutions but rather, that he was trying to usurp their authority and put himself in total control of any and all narratives. The absolute decimation of the trust the American people had in these institutions was just an unintended side-effect.

In Canada, we like to think that our society and culture is fundamentally different from that of the US. While that’s certainly true in some regards, it’s also true that we import a lot of cultural and societal norms and ideas from the US. This means that when issues happen in the US, it’s usually only a matter of time before they come here so alarm bells in Canada should ring when the US is in crisis. Part of this is also because we often have the luxury of letting the US go first when handling important issues. As seen with our own formation of government, Canada saw the problems that came with American republicanism and so chose instead to pursue  parliamentary democracy that resembled the British model. Immigration is another issue where Canada has built a model that is based on avoiding the problems associated with the US counterpart. Since the two countries are so closely connected, it’s only natural that when something happens in one, it elicits a strong response in the other (although American responses to Canadian events are typically less passionate). So, when public trust disintegrated in the US, it was only a matter of time before it would here.

But did we import our distrust or was our trust eroded by scandals? Since 2015, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took office, he has sparked numerous controversies. First, it was his trip to the Aga Khan’s private island in 2016 that resulted in an investigation by the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner which found him to have breached the Conflict of Interest Act and had the RCMP considering whether or not to charge him with fraud. Next was the SNC-Lavalin fiasco in 2019. This controversy accused the Prime Minister and his office of pressuring then-Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould to intervene in the corruption and fraud case against SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. and spare the company from criminal prosecution. The scandal resulted in the resignations of Wilson-Raybould, then-Treasury Board President Jane Philpott, Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister Gerald Butts, and Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick, as well as the determination, again, by the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner that the Prime Minister had breached the Conflict of Interest Act. A short while later in 2020 we had the WE Charity scandal that once more revolved around the actions of the Prime Minister. The third ethics investigation during Trudeau’s first five years in office focused on the payments given to members of the Prime Minister’s family by the WE Charity for speaking engagements and appearances while the Prime Minister was involved in Cabinet discussions about granting the charity federal contracts. This time, however, it was then-Minister of Finance Bill Morneau that was found to have committed a breach of the Conflict of Interest Act and the Prime Minister himself was cleared of wrongdoing.

But government scandals aren’t new. Politicians have always operated in gray-areas. Look at the Patriot Act, the Iran-Contra Affair, NSA surveillance, or basically anything done by the CIA for reasons not to trust the US government. In Canada, we have the aforementioned modern scandals coupled with Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act earlier this year to deal with the Freedom Convoy’s occupation of Ottawa and the recent accusations of government interference in the investigation into the 2020 Nova Scotia mass shooting, his father, Pierre Trudeau’s invocation of the much harsher War Measures Act during the October Crisis in 1970, and even Robert Borden’s decision to implement Conscription during World War I after promising not to as reasons to distrust the government.

It's clear that government scandals aren’t anything new, and to be fair, it’s unrealistic to expect politicians or governments to ever be “scandal-free” so that’s unlikely to change in the future. But if government scandals have been around for forever, what makes them so detrimental to public trust now? It’s possible that many people see trust in governments as misplaced due to their less-than-stellar track record and so place their trust in institutions and experts on a higher pedestal. But even that trust has been proven to be fragile.

Personally, it’s hard to think back to a time where distrust in institutions and experts was as widespread as during the pandemic. During an unprecedented global crisis, experts, institutions, and governments should work together to figure out what’s happening and what to do about it. In order to implement an effective plan though, it’s imperative that citizens trust these bodies and listen to what they say. “Anti-intellectualism”, the name given to this distrust of experts and intellectuals, is not a new phenomenon to the United States, but it’s clear that the pandemic has exacerbated it and brought it to the forefront of the American public discourse. It’s also become prevalent in Canada. Part of the reason for this is that the messaging around COVID-19 has been confusing. Masking has gone from being recommended, and then mandated, and then recommended again and in Ontario, indoor gathering limits were capped at 10 people for social gatherings but were increased to 100 for restaurants and bars. It’s bizarre to infer from those anecdotes that masks were not needed to protect against COVID-19, then they were for a time, and now they aren’t again, and that COVID-19 was somehow more transmissible in social gatherings of 10 people than in indoor gatherings of 100+ in restaurants or bars. This also pits experts against experts since government experts are the ones setting the policies and other experts are the ones challenging them. If the experts don’t make any sense, why should we trust them? Well for starters, situations like these that involve an evolving virus are fluid. The virus is constantly changing, as seen by the various variants that cropped up during each wave, and so our understanding of the virus is constantly changing as well. It’s natural that our strategies for dealing with such a virus would change as our understanding does too. But that doesn’t excuse the lack of clear and concise communication coming from the government which in turn does not justify the vitriol directed at some scientists and medical experts.

Another example that’s also pandemic related is the rise, or growth I guess, of the anti-vaccine movement. Since the COVID-19 vaccines became available, there’s been a concentrated effort to cast doubt on their efficacy which has oftentimes consumed peoples’ legitimate concerns about a new vaccine. Wild accusations such as being a vehicle for microchips, a lack of testing, mind control, and population control, to name a few, seemed to lay the bedrock for more hardline stances against the vaccines and their mandated uptake even as these claims were continuously disproven. It’s possible that regardless of their truth, the damage had already been done. For a particular section of the population, conflicting evidence and information was simply dismissed in favour of bias-confirming evidence and information peddled by disgraced doctors, extremist politicians, and unverified social media accounts. This has led not only to some people refusing the COVID-19 vaccines and regarding them with suspicion and contempt, but also to some people rejecting long-used vaccines for things like mumps, measles, rubella, and polio to name just a few. This example is indicative of the trust in experts and intellectuals being replaced by trust in echo-chambers and social media. It’s also important to note that some of this distrust towards vaccines and expertise is really rooted in a distrust of governments and the mandates they’ve imposed. The idea that the growing distrust is interconnected will be explored further later on.

While the pandemic has contributed a great deal to the erosion of trust in experts and intellectuals, it hasn’t been the sole driver. Look at issues like Critical Race Theory in schools in the US, another phenomenon we seem to be importing to Canada, as an example. Instead of listening to educators and experts that decide to implement this theory in school curriculum and having some sort of trust in their expertise and knowledge, we see a concentrated pushback based on exaggerated narratives that revolve around a distrust of educators and experts. Another example would be the “Don’t Say Gay” bill enacted in Florida that prohibits instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation from kindergarten to grade three and includes language vague enough to prevent teachers of all grades from even discussing such topics. Again, because trust in educators has faltered and instead of being seen as trusted mentors that kids can talk to about things they may not be comfortable discussing with their parents, they’ve now been unfairly and broadly painted as “groomers”.

Another example of the growing distrust in expertise and intellectuals is the discourse around climate change. For me personally, I’ve been aware of climate change since 2006 when Al Gore released his movie “An Inconvenient Truth”. I remember being shocked and scared at the idea that the Earth could be unliveable, and my life may change drastically. Since then, scientific consensus on climate change has stated that humans have played a part and there are opportunities for us to lessen our impact on the planet. And yet, we still don’t believe it and we push back against policies and directives enacted to try and solve the problem. Again, trust is fickle, and every time one climate scientist makes a mistake, it means that the entire thing is fake, we’ve been lied to by everyone, and we should never trust them again.

Okay. So, we’ve discussed the distrust in governments and experts but surely there must be someone out there we can rely on? Someone that can give us unbiased, factual information? How about the media! Just kidding. We all know the media can’t be trusted, right? Taking money from the federal government, being owned by a massive corporation, punditry, and biased reporting are all reasons why trust in media has plummeted and remained low over the last few years. It certainly doesn’t help when the President of the United States is constantly rallying against the media in a conscious attempt to undermine public trust in the institution. Some of these problems are a result of the natural evolution of media in our modern world. In a world where revenue is increasingly tied to engagement and clicks, it’s understandable that news organizations would lean towards publishing content that would generate said outcome. The problem is that to generate these clicks and engagement, the content that’s being published is often sensationalized and designed to generate outrage. This ends up eroding trust in governments, experts, institutions, and even the very media publishing these stories since readers are left believing there’s some sort of sinister agenda influencing the reporting of the news or that the reporters’, and news organizations’, biases are so strong that they can’t be trusted to provide an accurate accounting of the facts. The for-profit-privately-owned news business model can also result in private companies or citizens purchasing a news organization and then using it to further their own personal/business goals. The other problem is that the alternative business model, one that sees news organizations receive federal funding in order to maintain profitability, also results in eroding public trust since it leads to the belief that the media can not be impartial when reporting on government matters while simultaneously being paid by the government. Damned if you receive government funding, damned if you’re privately owned, I guess.

 The creation of the 24-hour news cycle has also has a negative affect on our trust in the media and it ties into the previous points about sensationalism and view/click generation. By implementing a 24-hour news cycle in, yes, an exciting world, but ultimately a world where important issues don’t usually evolve constantly over a 24-hour period. Alongside social media, this has contributed to reducing our attention spans and enabling us to focus solely on headlines and believing we can extract the context and implications provided by a detailed article from a few key words. This has also contributed to our declining trust in the media due to the media’s tendency to sensationalize stories and headlines in the hopes of remaining relevant over a 24-hour period and catching the wandering eye of readers.

I think it’d be fair to argue that the impact these issues have had on the erosion of public trust in governments, experts, and the media has mostly been an unintended side-effect of something else but there is a flip side. The opposite of unintentional erosion of trust is, of course, intentional erosion of trust. We can debate which is more damaging, but ultimately the end result of both is the same and I would argue that if the unintentional damages to trust were slowly chipping away, the intentional damages are what has, or is going to, split the stone in half. Politicians like Donald Trump and Maxime Bernier have weaponized their rhetoric to turn citizens against opposing politicians, government systems and institutions, experts, and the media. Disgraced or exploitative experts like Kulvinder Gill and Robert Malone have done the same. Media owners and executives like Ezra Levant and Steve Bannon have done the same. They’ve done it to further their own goals whether they be becoming the sole source of trust, maintaining their grip on their voter base, boosting their profile, making money, or even protecting their money. They had their goals, and they didn’t, and still don’t, care that destroying or undermining public trust in these institutions was what had, or has, to be done to achieve them. It’s bad enough that these institutions may be unintentionally lowering the public’s trust in themselves, but to combine it with the intentional erosion of trust by these bad-faith actors could be a fatal blow.

And this is where it gets really tricky. Has the blow already landed? Have we crossed the Rubicon? Maybe? Maybe not? What do we do if that fatal blow hasn’t hit yet? What if it’s still winding up? And does it matter? I think our path forward is ultimately the same regardless of whether or not public trust has been completely disintegrated.  The biggest problem is that the path is not an overnight journey and could take years before any measures of success are noticed. For starters, there has to be more accountability and transparency. These institutions are made up of humans and humans make mistakes. That should be expected and allowed, and their mistakes should be remedied as soon as possible. We shouldn’t hide these mistakes and expect the public to just “get over them”. They should be explained convincingly and clearly to the public, both how they happened and what’s going to be done to fix them. There needs to be a premium placed on communication and making sure said communications are easily understandable and factual. Governments and experts can no longer get away with the “just trust us because we know more than you”. That trust is broken and, fair or not, they need to bear some of the burden of repairing it. The first step towards regaining trust is admitting you’ve lost it and understanding what contributing mistakes were made. We also need to think hard about education and what we want our students to learn. Students need to learn how to pick out reliable sources in a world where almost all the information in the world is available at their fingertips. They need to be able to deconstruct arguments and understand what makes some strong and others weak. They need to understand what misinformation and disinformation look like, have a thorough understanding of how our governments and institutions work and how citizens can make their voice heard, and know the many histories of our country. While I understand that education is a provincial responsibility, perhaps it’s time to let them focus on delivery and create national standards for history and civics curriculum. It could also be time to expand the civics course from being half a semester (at least in Ontario) to being a semester-long course, moving the civics course from grade 10 to grade 12 so it’s more closely aligned to when students will actually get to vote, possibly instituting more mandatory history courses, possibly instituting more mandatory civics courses, introducing more in-depth civics curriculum for elementary students in order to provide students with a more substantial knowledge base prior to high school, or maybe even creating a government-run-teacher-delivered civics course administered outside the school that students are required to pass before moving on to the next year. We also need to evaluate the media business models we’re currently employing. We need to find a way to steer the news away from profits and towards the common good. If that means coming up with a federal subsidy program that operates at arms length from the government and is completely transparent with it’s funding numbers, then so be it. I think this is especially important with local news sources. We’ve seen a decline in local news and if we want to stand a chance in the fight against misinformation, local journalism needs to be one of our strongest institutions. We also need to do away with “academic language”. I find this to be a considerable barrier to expanding understanding. If you can’t understand what you’re reading, you’ll have to rely on someone else to tell you what the words mean. If everyone in the world acts in good faith, that’s not a problem, but as we’ve seen, that isn’t the case. That might also help to lessen the growing sense of anti-intellectualism. Like I said, these actions probably won’t bear fruit for years and enacting them or making real progress on them will be hard work and will probably generate a lot of pushback and unpopularity. I believe it’s worth it and I would argue that it’s better to take the hit now and prepare our future for success than to keep kicking the can down the road until our society collapses. Is that too sensational?

There’s no doubt that the pandemic worsened most of the already existing tensions in our society. Maybe the further removed we are from the lockdowns and the height of the pandemic, the calmer and more rational we’ll become, and we can maybe get back to where we were before our entry into post-truth society. Perhaps all the time spent communicating through screens and the feelings of isolation have made governments, experts, and the media seem very far-removed from the situation on the ground. As we ease back to “normal” hopefully these feelings will dissipate and we’ll remember that politicians, experts, and journalists are people too. If trust is like a piece of paper, it’s definitely been torn up, crumpled beyond recognition, and tossed in the recycling bin. Maybe we shouldn’t try and tape the pieces back together. Maybe we need to grab a fresh sheet.