Category: Chairman’s Desk

As winter melts into spring and vaccination rates rise steadily, the end of the pandemic has, mercifully, begun. The indescribable events we have lived through this past year and a half have shaken us to our core, leading us to question our most fundamental beliefs — about the role of government, business and other institutions, and about the competency of the leaders within those institutions.

When it comes to assessing the impact of events like the COVID-19 pandemic, you need to look at the horse race numbers and you need to look underneath to what is often referred to as the “architecture” of the opinion.

And there you find one of the most common measures is trust. Trust can be a very slippery thing in polling: distinct from “approval,” and less committed than “support,” it reflects an intangible faith in an individual or institution’s moral compass — faith that they will do the right thing, even in the depths of a crisis like COVID.

Typically, trust is built up very gradually, or slowly eroded over time. Many people are familiar with tracking studies that measure incremental movements in the level of trust among different institutions. These polls told us the story of declining trust in institutions like the church or the news media, over a period of many years and many news cycles.

So, when we talk about COVID as a once-in-a-generation event, that is true of its impact on public opinion too. In a new poll conducted by Discover, the fully integrated research offering from our firm Navigator, the meteoric impact of the pandemic on trust levels is crystal clear.

Anecdotally, we all knew this would be the rare event that breaks through in a fundamental sense. It is already uncommon to have a universal event that affects every single one of us. Many commentators, myself included, have been closely following the ups and downs of daily political polling, because during such times, the fluctuations can be dramatic. But what this new poll shows us is that COVID has prompted a deeper, tectonic shift in terms of who we trust. That shift will have profound consequences.

Between April 30 and May 4, Discover polled 1,500 Canadians, asking them whether they have gained or lost trust in their political leaders and in a range of institutions over the course of the pandemic. Using these results, they calculated a pandemic trust progression score for each leader, derived by taking the percentage of Canadians who had gained trust in them, minus the percentage who had lost trust.

By this measure, most elected leaders should be concerned. The prime minister himself is underwater by 25 points, with 44 per cent of respondents saying they trust Trudeau less now compared to the start of the pandemic. More than half of Albertans say they trust Premier Jason Kenney less today, giving him a score of -41. A majority of Ontarians felt the same way about Premier Doug Ford, giving him a score of -31.

Among the fold, there is one premier who has defied the trend of collapsing trust, and that is Premier Legault in Quebec. Some 43 per cent of Quebecers now trust their premier more, which is reflected in his overall high approval ratings.

But even as most premiers lost trust, other public institutions picked up the slack: small- and medium-sized businesses gained 22 points on the trust progression score. The scientific community was one of the biggest beneficiaries, including a 17-point jump among Conservative Party supporters. It may come as no surprise that people trust big business less, but at the same time, Canadians also trust their employers more today than they did at the beginning of the pandemic.

It remains to be seen how these deep changes in trust will translate into votes. Could it be that the new-found trust among Conservatives for scientists might translate, eventually, into more support for action on climate change? Does the collapse in trust for big business among Liberals push the party into traditional NDP policy territory? The long-term consequences are impossible to predict, but fascinating to contemplate. What is clear is that in the aftermath of COVID-19, our politics will never be the same again.

For those on Twitter or otherwise tuned into the political world’s 24-hour spin cycle, the past 100 days have been marked by an unusual phenomenon: the casual hum of political discourse in the absence of Donald J. Trump.

On the streets and in the news, Trump’s legacy marches on through COVID denial, hysteria about the “BIG LIE” of election fraud and the steady purging from the Republican Party of common sense and dissenting opinions.

But the troller-in-chief himself has been notably absent from the airwaves, providing nary a peep on social media. He’s barely engaging in interviews, or even appearing in public for that matter.

Of course, Trump’s quiet is due in part to his exile from the platforms he once held dear, but it is also a sign that his grip on American life is fading — that most Americans have tuned out his vision of the world.

Astonishingly, it may turn out that after all the insanity of the last four years, the damage and the impact of Trump may prove to have been all sound and fury. That the impact may be as ephemeral as the man is bellicose. With a legacy as enduring as a Popsicle in the summer sun, save for the wretched cultural division it has created.

For the past four years, many people — myself among them — have despaired at the damage Trump inflicted on the stature and legacy of the American presidency. He eschewed norms, abandoned allies and at times transformed the pageantry of the office into a pantomime or worse, an infomercial.

“How,” I wondered “will his successor ever achieve any measure of greatness with an office so diminished in stature both in the nation and the world?”

For that reason, many expected that any president who followed one as disruptive as President Trump would need to be a transitional president. One who would give the country time to catch its breath and to throw off the chaos of the previous four years.

After the Watergate scandal, for example, left the presidency in tatters, it took the presidencies of both Ford and Carter before Americans were ready for another transformative president — Ronald Reagan

Now, just over 100 days since Trump left office, President Biden has determined to avoid the same fate. Far from proving Trump’s erosion of the office irreparable, Biden has shown himself capable of being so much more than simply an interim president.

In fact, he has chosen the opposite playbook. Biden has surprised many by enthusiastically and unapologetically taking up the mantle of his party. He has paid a homage to its history by expanding the American social safety net in ways unprecedented since the mid-20th century. With a sure-footedness that belies his status as a rookie president, Biden is moving, leaps and bounds, to transform the role of the state in American life. If he succeeds, his legacy will be paralleled only by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.

What’s more, Biden’s undertaking is about much more than an injection of spending or increased supports for the middle and working classes. It is a move to reshape the social contract Americans have with one another and their government. And in doing so restore the stature — and power — of the presidency itself.

In his speech to both houses of Congress last month, Biden spoke of his plans as a “once in a generation investment in our families and our children,” acknowledging the position of his undertaking alongside FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. Whatever moniker is bestowed on his own administration’s legacy — even if there is none at all — no one can call it an interim presidency.

If he fails to pass the legislation foundational to his vision, Biden will nonetheless have proven that the president can attempt truly transformational change. That the office he holds can still live up to the challenge of its history. In doing so, Biden will help to clear the rubble of his predecessor, further drowning out the sound and fury of a past presidency which stood for little beyond its own grim world view.

As the country struggles through the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have finally obtained enough distance from the first wave to consider it properly in hindsight.

In those early days of the pandemic, when we knew so little and feared so much, governments around the world tried all manner of policy responses. Among the most popular was some form of travel restriction or border closure: by some measures, international travel restrictions were the second most popular policy response, after public information campaigns.

If you were to listen to the global public health community’s response to this initial wave of closures and restrictions, you might think it was among the most disastrous decisions of the pandemic. The conventional wisdom was that travel restrictions were at best unhelpful, and at worst actively counterproductive.

This truism and the beliefs that underpin it — that disease does not respect borders, that people will find a way to travel regardless, and they will go through dangerous unofficial channels if you close official ones — all dovetails perfectly with the general left-wing viewpoint on immigration.

Though it may be politically congenital to those who wish to see open borders, the public health opposition to border closures was not grounded in any real scientific fact. It was based on hunches about human behaviour.

In fact, one of the professors who authored the international pandemic playbook for the World Health Organization (which recommended against border closures) was quoted in Vox last week, saying “I have now realized that our belief about travel restrictions was just that — a belief. It was evidence-free.”

This is a shocking admission. If the idea had no evidence underpinning it, then why was it so popular? Here in Toronto, we survived both the SARS pandemic and the travel advisories imposed on the city by the WHO. As a result, we were very familiar with the potentially damaging effects of travel restrictions. Perhaps a lingering sense of grievance contributed to the desire to avoid border closures this time around.

Eventually, most public health authorities concluded that travel restrictions did nothing to prevent SARS, and that they inflicted a great deal of suffering and economic damage on cities like Toronto.

In the years since, through scares like Ebola or MERS, travel restrictions similarly didn’t seem to work well. And so the belief that border closures don’t work, full stop, became the kind of conventional wisdom that can all too often be confused with scientific fact.

As countries scrambled to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, they imposed border closures and travel restrictions, but based on political objections such as those cited above, these policies were porous to varying degrees. Even former U.S. president Donald Trump, who often touted his decision to close the border to China, left too many loopholes for the policy to be truly effective.

But while most countries included some manner of loophole, a few chose to go the full nine yards. Again with the benefit of hindsight, it seems possible to attribute those countries’ success in combating COVID to that fateful decision.

Take the country of Vietnam: at the end of 2020, the country had reported only 35 deaths from COVID. They had a paltry 1,465 cases over those first nine months of the pandemic, a fraction of its neighbours, including nearby China where the virus originated.

Experts now attribute this astonishing success in large part to the border closure. The country has also taken other policy interventions, such as test, trace and isolate, much more seriously — though even these additional measures are made possible by their low case count. Other countries that have experienced comparatively better outcomes, like Taiwan or New Zealand, have also featured extremely intense international border closures.

This is only one area in which we are beginning to reassess the conventional wisdom that has guided our response to date, and reconsider our steps and missteps in the earliest days of the pandemic. This episode speaks to the fallibility of our top doctors and public health authorities. If there is one clear lesson here, we must never allow what is politically convenient to guide our response, whether the issue is border closures, travel restrictions or vaccine allocations.

As the pandemic marches inevitably on toward its second summer of lockdowns and physical distancing, it can be easy to lose notice of just how much our lives have changed.

This is especially true, I think, for those of us who have grown accustomed to working from home and to the reliable, quiet drift of each day into the next that comes with it.

We may not miss the jetsam of our former lives — the habits and activities we were able to gladly throw overboard in the face of COVID-19. But the flotsam of this pandemic, the chaos and destruction it has caused, the upheaval of entire neighbourhoods, is a reality we can’t escape.

Nowhere is this wreckage more pronounced than in the ghost town of Toronto’s PATH system.

These days, a stroll through the PATH is a stark reminder that the office as we knew it has been turned entirely upside down. For many companies, this pandemic has been a forced foray into the world of working from home, or as some wags prefer: live at work.

For the most part, employees seem to be content with the changes to their routine. In fact, a recent poll of Canadians suggests that one in three would look for a new job if asked to return to the office full-time. That is a remarkable figure, especially given the precarity and general insecurity many are still feeling about their lives, their future and their work.

What’s more, it speaks to the reality that is dawning on the other end of this pandemic. Just as they had to adapt last year, employers need to prepare for a return to work that is responsive to all that has changed — and with it the new expectations of their employees.

I don’t belong to the category of those who think we will never return to the office. Quite the opposite. In my view, people will return to the office, in part, because they miss their old lives. But also because business imperatives will push us back.

Fundamentally, there are three crucial things that are lost without the chance to work together in the same space.

First, the element of companionship and camaraderie that solidifies our working relationships. Part of what’s missing in a virtual workplace is the natural ebb and flow of professional and personal time. In the office, we go from coffee to meetings to lunch and then back to work, all the while establishing enriching personal bonds.

Second, we lose the opportunity for collaboration and collision to organically improve the work we do. No chance for a conversation overheard or some coincidental synergy to make all the difference to a project. Something that given the tightness and closeness of our country, matters more to us than most.

Finally, without a return to the office, we lose much of the benefit of mentorship — which just cannot have the same impact in remote work. This is especially a loss for younger professionals, who won’t have the opportunity for crucial advancement and learning from their colleagues.

There, three quick reasons why the office is not dead — yet. But I also recognize that change is necessary. The best answer? Most likely a hybrid model, where solitary work that can be done with minimal collaboration is done in a new way, while work that requires collaboration is conducted (at least more often) in a shared space.

And, of course, we must recognize that for all the changes we can expect to our physical office experience, the policies that underpin our work life will need to change too.

Many companies will be more flexible about work schedules. Some will reconfigure how workload is allocated. Our own firm has implemented a policy of unlimited vacation, recognizing that strict allotments of vacation time are out of sync with the reality of how we now work and live our lives.

Whatever the specific solutions, the important thing is for business leaders to recognize the tide of change that’s taken place, and adapt accordingly.