The Cost Of Ignoring The News

For far too many people, “I don’t really follow the news” has become the survival strategy of our era.

Who can blame them? I follow and subscribe to dozens of Substacks and other news sources and my days off are increasingly spent reading articles and essays by numerous writers and content creators calling attention to, analysing, reacting to, and sharing information about events all over the world.

The result is a constant feeling that can best be described as approaching burn-out. How can I raise my young family and do my completely apolitical day job while the world smoulders around us? Ignoring it all would seem to be a very much easier and healthier path.

Sharing what I am reading, sometimes writing to fill in gaps in what I am seeing, trying to get my head around where we are going has become my own way to cope. I cannot ignore what is happening and I cannot handle inaction.

I served as an MP for four years during a period of relative domestic calm and stability after spending most of six years as a relatively junior opposition staffer in the Harper era. I lost my seat to the Bloc candidate months before the Covid pandemic changed the world in ways we are still struggling to grasp. As that crisis began, former colleagues who had won their re-election into that period expressed how lucky I was that I did not have to deal with it.

They and their staff were trapped at home. Their communities faced monumental uncertainty. Phone calls and emails asking ‘when will it end?’ flooded and overwhelmed them, questions for which they had no answers. At first, I felt relieved. I had, in some ways, dodged a bullet.

As our by-then minority government struggled to react quickly enough to salvage the economy and the livelihoods of millions of citizens, they made rapid and difficult decisions that would help in the short term but risk long term consequences. The programs they created risked offering support to people who did not need help in the interests of ensuring that those who did need it would not be unduly obstructed from getting it.

An mRNA vaccine that the scientific community had long planned as the solution to the next pandemic was developed and distributed in record time. The healthcare system was collapsing under the weight of too many patients and not enough treatment options, where putting the contagiously sick in ICUs risked concentrating pathogens and spreading the disease as much as treating its victims.

Using the vaccine to achieve the herd immunity necessary to get the pandemic under control became essential, not so much for the individual survival of young able-bodied people who felt invulnerable to what they saw as a bad cold, but to curb the spread to those whose infections would further crush the healthcare system.

The social distancing, travel restrictions, mask and vaccine mandates at the time were not about eliminating the disease, and they did not pretend to be. They were about slowing the rate of transmission to salvage the healthcare system and allow the creation of a path out of a difficult global pandemic.

People who were not personally impacted by the disease and the healthcare collapse felt it was government overreach. They were being told they could not go out, they could not cross provincial or international borders without papers, they were being forced to accept an injection mandated by their government. Many lost their jobs for refusing to participate. They saw their freedom being attacked, without understanding — or caring — that the collective freedom of the society to function was on the table. They were not following the wider news, only interested in what impacted them directly.

The well-funded disinformation machine that had had recent practice over Brexit and the election of Trump took advantage of this sentiment and wilful ignorance to expand its Canadian footprint. People fearing government overreach and vaccine mandates could be mobilised to destabilise yet another western country. The flames were fanned with near limitless resources.

Pretty soon, an angry mob fed by that machine descended on Ottawa, calling for the fall of the government and the end of the vaccine mandates that were offering us a way to salvage our collapsing healthcare system and break the death spiral of the pandemic.

As I watched it all, as the country rapidly and necessarily redrew its economic and social priorities, I felt I had missed my chance to make a real tangible long term difference. Society was being redrawn from the ground up, and I was working in a windowless operations centre office two timezones from the riding I had grown up in and represented, a world of travel restrictions away from a Parliament in which I had worked for nearly a decade, unable to meaningfully participate when that participation would have been at its greatest value.

I had not dodged a bullet at all. To the contrary, I felt that I had missed my moment. But it is not necessary to be on the Hill to push for change.

This period was an opportunity not to complain about government overreach, but to look at the role of government holistically. It was the time that we had as a country to have meaningful, deep, longer term debates about topics like guaranteed minimum income, the long term viability of our health care system, our role in the wider world.

But we, collectively, missed our best shot. Throughout the western world, not only in Canada, we let this opportunity slip by us. We dealt with self-interested and uninformed protest, funded instability, and primarily sought to regain only normalcy and stability. We rushed to get the country back to the way it had been rather than the way it could be. We never explained how the restrictions and mandate had overwhelmingly succeeded in their stated objectives, the end of which had allowed people to doubt their purpose.

The festering resentment of the pandemic restrictions and the lack of meaningful social change since have allowed parties interested in further sowing those divisions to bring us ever closer to the hard-right turn observed in some of our closest allies.

The people were — are — clamouring for ambitious social change. They were met instead with things like return-to-office mandates that kept wealthy commercial real estate owners happy without addressing the lessons learned about an economy that could largely function from home.

This lack of ambition has brought us to a place where right wing demagogues are rising around the world. At least they are willing to change something, even if it is not the change the people are clamouring for, so they get the support of those unsatisfied with the pace and direction of the changes (not) brought about by a single global health calamity in a missed opportunity of historic proportions.

When we stop following the news, when we stop listening to what is happening, when we just try to live our own lives, we are all missing our moment. This is the time to demand radically ambitious progress, not the time to protect and defend a status quo that does not work for the vast majority of people. The fight is bigger than performative discussions around woke politics; it is about essential fundamental structural change.

Keeping our heads down and hoping we won’t be personally affected is what is allowing the most powerful country in the world to build concentration camps, start wars, make a mockery of international law, and further abuse the working class. It is what is allowing their Canadian ideological siblings to maintain and expand their foothold in Canada, waiting for a more charismatic leader to seal their deal for us, too.

When we stop following the news, when we stop paying attention to what is happening beyond the boundaries of our immediate lives, we cede our power, our influence, our aspirations to those with very different ideas of progress — and who gets to benefit.