HOW TO MAKE THINGS WORSE

I’m not in Ottawa and have no idea what happened or is happening with this 'trucker convoy' thing. I don't know who’s involved or not, where it began or why, or what any of this is actually about. What I do know is that the communication around all of this is perfectly insane. We're not just being offered, as ever, an overly simplistic moral rhetoric reducing the world into untenable categories of good and evil. That's pretty normal and bad enough. What we have here also combines the usual silliness with layers of outlandish contradiction. Because of that, you cannot have watched or read our most trusted news sources or taken in what is offered up on social media and come away with any understanding – other than the certainty you are being lied to on every front. Perhaps most troublingly, its all so transparent that we know we're being lied to from nothing more than the reporting itself. That's a real problem and says nothing good about where we are at.

THE MESSAGING

To listen to social media, it appears a gaggle of redneck truckers fell in with a flock of naïve anti-vaxxers who became associated with some militant skinheads and all for the purpose of desecrating memorials and causing millions in lost profits to downtown Ottawa, all while spewing racist, antisocial vitriol using military-grade psychological warfare tactics.

When I tune into CBC to try and get some picture of this madness, they talk about how the "protest convoy highlights the power of misinformation." They speak of radicals motivated by a campaign of lies and out to cause mayhem. They also highlight criminal investigations underway relating to memorial desecrations. And all of this is explained while video footage of the folks in attendance streams by.

An invited guest, Timothy Caulfield, a law professor, speaks to the CBC presenter about people with a “hardcore … far-right ideology” pushing a radical agenda and how no small fringe protest should be allowed to sway policy or influence the public discourse. Caulfield goes on to explain his sense that, with regard to the pandemic response, in hindsight, things probably should have been handled differently. Canadians, he tells us, needed to have their hand held more by experts like himself and been walked through all the nuances and inherent uncertainties that come with vaccines specifically and public health more broadly. Both presenter and guest talk about how nearly everyone in Canada is now vaccinated anyway, so this whole protest was moot at its inception, and how the pandemic is effectively over. They reiterate that we shouldn't let these "extreme elements, that are twisting the science and misrepresenting where we are, have an outsized role" in the conversation.

CONTRADICTIONS

Firstly, there absolutely is bad information out there. For all I know, everything these truckers and those following were on about may very well be pure, ignorance-induced nonsense and confusion. And most of this may be motivated by hatred. Fine. But what are CBC and the honoured voice of reason they've invited to comment doing to correct the record, spread understanding, or provide people with the tools to better make sense of things? Zero. In fact, they labour to make things worse.

For example, all of the information I’ve been getting about the pandemic has come from leading experts publishing in leading journals and working with top institutions; which is to say, not radical alternative sources or folks who’ve listened to half of a podcast one time and decided they know more about disease than everyone else combined. And these experts have published their own studies, meta-analyses, and labouriously spelled out the science that vigorously refutes our public health messaging as well as our most futile mitigation measures. More than that, some have even called out Canada, specific provinces, and individual health authorities and officials for their appalling lack of transparency, irresponsible misreporting and persistent misinformation, as well as their failure to follow the simplest and best-known science.

One of those persons is Jose-Luis Jimenez, renowned expert in aerosols and disease transmission from the University of Colorado Boulder. He publicly declared that Vancouver Coastal Health was on his personal list of "worst practices worldwide in mitigation of COVID-19 transmission." More broadly, he publicly labelled BC one of the most "retrograde" jurisdictions on the planet with regard to communicating and mitigating disease transmission. But that wasn't a one-off while he was having a bad day, Jimenez has continued to express his dismay. And, you’ll note if you do a search that, somehow, in two years CBC has failed to have this most-cited aerosols expert on to explain himself and enlighten us all about the science of disease transmission – their whole darned job.

Similarly, Deepti Gurdasani, a British MD, clinical epidemiologist, and statistical geneticist from Queen Mary University of London, and someone who has emerged out of the pandemic din as a trusted voice of reason, noted that:

If there's one place that's even more in the dark ages on evidence on school transmission and mitigations, and school policy than England- it's BC. As expected the misinformation comes directly from those who should be protecting children & communities.

Again, no reason for the CBC to speak with someone who is clearly a delusional, biased, and politically motivated non-expert.

Or how about Yaneer Bar-Yam (Boston-based pandemic expert and complex systems physicist who, among other things, warned of a pending global pandemic for more than a decade and advised the WHO during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa)? He was advocating for zero COVID and swift, deliberate over-reactions as the only proven approach to getting ahead of the virus and dealing with exponential growth. He also pointed to Canada's fatalism, political inertia, and a culture of misinformation surrounding the insular clique of experts the government calls upon for answers and direction. Too, Bar-Yam argued that the central dogma of most Canadian politicians is that the economy must come first. And, as he explains, this is not merely an approach unsupported by any evidence but is one vehemently contradicted by a pile of examples to the contrary. And, again, apparently we have a confused degenerate not worth speaking to.

So, with the above examples, is it more radical or reasoned to have developed some skepticism about our response to the pandemic over the last two years? And is expressing such skepticism uncalled for at this time (when, for example, BC is now experiencing more deaths and hospitalizations than at any time prior – six months after local health authorities declared the pandemic effectively over and when they're now telling us the coast is clear and we should all welcome this virus into our lives?) I don't think so. And is there any evidence that reporters and commentators are attempting to help us better understand the situation and get to the truth of any related matters? Or are we blindly defending our friends or a favoured narrative regardless of how mistaken they are or what the cost will be? And is it more sensible to label anyone questioning our policies or mandates a wicked peddler of misinformation, or is that itself an indefensibly radical position?

Secondly, and worse, every bit of footage the CBC showed in this report I watched was of a diverse crowd of folks carrying Canadian and Quebec flags, wearing multilingual "Free Hugs" t-shirts, passing around Tim Horton's coffee, and holding posters with terrifying messaging such as "We are all one," "Coercion is not consent," "My body my choice," “Don’t mess with moms,” "End the censorship," and "[Vaccine] passports are tyranny and discrimination." (But don't take my word for it, go look for yourself.) Now, these people may very well be all of the worst elements within our society, and this may have been the coming out event for the nation's Black and Brown neo-Nazis, I don't know, but I've never seen visual messaging so incongruent with accompanying verbal messaging in all my life.

While guest expert and reporter discuss the most extreme views, we're shown a sea of disturbingly positive scenes and signage. Though I’m alarmed by even vague displays of patriotism myself and also by anyone who drinks Timmy Ho’s, crowds carrying flags and passing around the national beverage tends to be the sort of thing CBC is all about. I mean, far from a white-supremacist anti-vaxx rally, to look at this footage is to assume this non-event is part of their official Olympics coverage, with people of all stripes gathering at the parliament in celebration of someone taking bronze in women's singles luge, or something. Of course, it could be that a team of censors at CBC worked all day and night to surgically expunge every unpleasant scene and symbol from these many different clips and replace those with their antithesis; but then, obviously, having done so would only confirm the concerns of those labelled a delusional fringe.

Thirdly, on the video above and across their platforms, CBC reports the unbelievable wickedness of the defacing of a Terry Fox statue in Ottawa. They tell us “The figure was draped with a hockey cap on its head, a Canadian flag wrapped around its neck, an upside down Canadian flag hanging from its arm and a placard reading ‘Mandate Freedom’ wedged under another arm.” Not only were these accoutrements immediately removed, as it turns out, but we’re also told in the same sentence that Canadians saw such horrific images and immediately took to social media to “express their outrage over what happened" and, further, that such a vulgar defilement of this sacred image prompted Canadians to pledge money to the Terry Fox Foundation. But the above was not the only unimaginably vile desecration they report. The CBC then explains how (now, prepare yourself) Ottawa police are also “investigating allegations that protesters desecrated the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the National War Memorial by dancing on it during the protest.” Global News has the damning footage.

I don't even know what I can say about this other than you should be enraged and in the opposite direction these messengers wish you to be. This is transparent misinformation conjured and used by the very people telling you they're key players on the front lines of countering any and all misinformation. This is indistinguishable from a firefighter with a flamethrower explaining to you how she's putting out the inferno, the one she started, in your kitchen.

Pairing their aggressive certainty and torrent of noise with the many contradictions we can all see with our own eyes is challenging enough, but it's far worse than that. All of the above also arrives within a context that every reader and viewer is perfectly aware of and just recently experienced for themselves. These people, apparently enraged by someone temporarily tying a Canadian flag as a cape on the statue of someone we are told is a national hero, are the very people passionately explaining away or otherwise overlooking deaths, billions in damages, and a wave of monument destructions as merely the cost of doing the difficult business of raising awareness. But not just that. As we all know, all of that behaviour was carried out by the most minor and fringe elements; people wildly misrepresenting where we’re at and doing so all while demanding to have an outlandishly outsized role, or else. These are the same people who demanded immunity from all repercussions for themselves and any associates (due to their self-styled righteous cause) as well as exquisite dissociation with their closest colleagues, the worst elements of the mob (and people we were told were not handing out weapons and lobbing Molotov cocktails as we watch them do so in real-time, 4K HD, and from nine different vantage points.) And now these same folks warn their neighbours and co-workers, loudly and again in writing, that to participate in an event attended by anyone with terrible views or the worst of intentions (or anyone given that label, based on no information at all) is synonymous with you yourself holding those terrible views and worst of intentions – and, also, very clearly confirming that you will be treated as if you are such a monster.

In this light, it is not hard to see how it may appear to some that these commentators – folks calling out their neighbours as unprincipled and (due to their class, lack of education, political leanings, skin colour, or some pernicious combination of all of the above) easily manipulated by a wicked ideology – are themselves just so unmoored and suffering from some mild, socially contagious (and increasingly epidemic) form of psychopathy or sociopathy.

• Psy·​chop·​a·​thy \ sī-ˈkä-pə-thē \ - when thoughts, emotions, and perceptions are impaired such that an individual may have difficulty understanding what is real and what is not.

• So·​ci·​op·​a·​thy \ sō-sē-ˈäp-ə-thē \ - a disorder, sometimes referred to as antisocial personality disorder, in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others.

HOW DO WE FIX THIS?

I think the first thing to do is to understand one’s motivations. Are we (you, me, CBC) blindly expressing the approved dogma of a political tribe to reinforce our status as a member in good standing? And are we doing this while othering our neighbours and helping to score goals against this enemy, because we are fundamentally on opposing teams engaged in a game of winner-take-all? Or are we trying to understand what is true, in all its messiness and regardless of the hits we ourselves may have to take because, like it or not, this thing isn’t zero-sum, we need one another, and are ultimately all in this together?

From there, if we're claiming to be combating misinformation, at the very least we need to be transparent. And then as a rule we also must present, regardless of their viewpoint, the very best of what folks have to offer, their strongest and most heartfelt argument and not a choice selection of misquotes or mistakes. Why would we do this? Well, yes, because it makes no sense to do anything else and we cannot claim to have any ethical footing otherwise. Sure. (I mean, what have we done if we've only falsified someone's weakest idea or a hypothesis they have not forwarded?) Those are good reasons and enough, but also if we don't do this then we are helping to create and sustain situation where anything at all can (and, doubtless, will) be easily manipulated into what it is not and for any reason at all. This is unsustainable chaos. Insane.

And then there’s misinformation itself (if it is truly that and not merely information I personally wish to discredit it.) Misinformation tends to find its audience when something becomes politicized and, by this political framing, folks are then shielded from and inoculated against any argument. For example, one’s stance on vaccines, climate change, or abortion seldom has anything whatsoever to do with one's level of science education, their ability to reason, or their ethical intuitions but almost entirely in accordance with their political leanings. We know this. We also can’t let every crucial thing fall into this silly and inextricable trap that reinforces such ineffectual us/them thinking and makes our ability to engage in meaningful dialogue (the only alternative we have to exchanging blows) nearly impossible.