Juno News - January 21, 2022Science and policy experts are putting forward a real reopening plan. Will politicians listen？
Episode Stats
Summary
The Canada Science and Policy Committee to Exit the Pandemic has been formed, and its co-chair, Dr. Irvin Student, a Rhodes Scholar and former soccer pro, joins me to talk about what it means to exit the pandemic.
Transcript
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I mentioned at the beginning of the program here that all of the science tables, the science
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advisory committees have tended to approach the pandemic with a one-track mind that looks
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at getting case counts down, even at the expense of economic welfare, mental health care, effect
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on children, child development, all of these other things which are absolutely critical
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and I think by and large have gone ignored or certainly undervalued through the course
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Kids being pulled out of school yet again in many provinces is a great reminder of this.
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Well, all of these science advisory committees have had this narrow focus, so there's now
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a private sector alternative, if I can call it that, a group that's assembled together
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to bring together experts, scientific experts, and public policy experts to achieve the lofty
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This is the Canada Science and Policy Committee to Exit the Pandemic, which launched yesterday
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and the co-chair of this is Irvin Student, who again, I'd use the whole show if I wanted
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He's of course helming the Institute for 21st Century Questions, but in this context, he's
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the co-chair of the Canada Science and Policy Committee to Exit the Pandemic.
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One of the big things we've been so mired in for the last two years has been how we
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It was originally going to be, as you know, two weeks and then a couple of weeks longer,
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and now we're looking at basically the third calendar year of the COVID era.
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Why have the discussion now about what it means to exit this whole thing?
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Well, we're not having a discussion and we're not searching for meaning.
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So we've struck up a national committee, properly national, across all the province,
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all the regions, all the territories, to choreograph and exit from the pandemic for
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What we've done with the new Canada Science and Policy Committee, which is based out of
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the Institute for 21st Century Questions, one of Canada's leading think tanks, is that we brought
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together the two solitudes, the two intellectual solitudes of this pandemic, the scientific and
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medical community and the policy committee community and operating in silos and in solitude.
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We need to map out a holistic exit across the systems of society, across our multiple crises
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We're there to exit because otherwise the country will not survive.
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A lot of the science advisory committees that we have giving their guidance to provincial
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governments right now are digging deeper and deeper into lockdowns and into restrictions.
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What is it that your experts are seeing that they aren't?
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Well, first of all, we make several shifts that I think are missing.
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First of all, we bring together again the scientists and the policy people.
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One of my fundamental diagnoses of our catastrophes, and we have multiple catastrophes in the country,
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is that the politicians are illiterate on science, but the science and medical community stinks
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We try to make up for each other's weaknesses and advance each other's areas of expertise.
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First of all, that's one of the major shifts of this national committee to exit.
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It is one of many inputs, but it is not a science project.
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We are not, as one Ontario official said, looking at the virus as in charge.
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It is to choreograph an exit that has been already choreographed in many other advanced and less
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The other shift is that we are doing real systems thinking across the systems.
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Andrew, you'll appreciate that in our country today, we don't have one single crisis.
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We actually have six or seven crises of system nationally.
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The pandemic becomes the minor crisis before long.
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We have an economic crisis of historical proportions.
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We have an institutional crisis and we have a growing social crisis, one of broken norms.
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We need to work across all these systems and exit in the coming months.
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Many countries in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in the Middle East, and Latin America are already
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This is a unique committee in that it's practical.
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We bring together really properly national experts across all the disciplines representing
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It is really national and we plan to exit because the country needs it desperately and we will
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provide both the advice and the courage and the vocabulary and the frameworks to do so.
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Is this plan one that only governments are in a position to accept or reject or is there
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something here that businesses and individuals can take from as well as they move forward?
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In the end, of course, it's a government exit because government is choreographing a lot of
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So it's a policy exit informed by science, but all these other areas, economics, social
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I should say the media plays a major role and individual leaders in communities, civil society
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and institutions play a major role in changing the psychology.
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We must not over sentimentalize the last two years and lick our wounds about where we are
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That's one of the big weaknesses in our national response.
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We must be purposeful and bold and we must exit as a mature country.
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In fact, if you look back at some of the diagnoses, and I think this will be the case when we look
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back a number of years, hence on where we've been weakest, we say that we not only overreacted,
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but we didn't properly gauge the nature and the measure of the crisis.
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And in world historical terms, this was not a major crisis.
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And countries that have endured far larger crises acted with much more maturity because
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And here's how we respond, given all our other tragedies in the past.
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Fortunately for Canada, we haven't had major public catastrophes at this scale over the
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last hundred years, even almost since Confederation, if I may be so bold.
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So our reaction has been non-systematic, immature, overly sentimental.
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And we're here to be strictly practical, to exit.
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And we mean to exit because as proud Canadians, we realize that if we continue the forward scenario
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is not status quo, it is continued disintegration, including the possible collapse of the country.
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So we need to reverse that energy and we mean to do it in the coming few months.
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So let's talk about a parallel universe here in which your committee is the one driving public
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policy in Canada or in one or all of the provinces here.
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What's the day one action that you'd take to implement this plan?
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Well, first of all, let's talk about when the exit actually happens, when we declare
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that this is over for all practical intents and purposes for Canada.
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One is that COVID becomes largely endemic and seen thus.
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And I believe the chief medical officer of health of Canada, Teresa Tam, declared that
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But you don't think Canada is there just yet, you're saying, correct?
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Second point is that the pandemic, even in the endemic form, becomes properly gauged.
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That is, we deal with people with comorbidities, aged people, the vulnerable in a specific class
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of treatment and intervention of various intelligent forms like we would have in 2019.
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We would treat them as vulnerable and we intervene maturely.
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But for the rest of the society, starting with the young and the able and everyone else,
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we work, work, work, build, build, build, and learn, learn, learn, and play, play, play
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And the final point on the exit is that on a proper systems view, we begin to understand
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If we imagine we have six or seven or eight balls in the air in a society as massive and
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complex as Canada, the pandemic is just a part of one ball.
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It is not the totality of our crisis, not the totality of our imagination, and we don't
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imagine that there's just one exit for all these crises, including that one little ball.
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So it's a systems apprehension that we will impose on both decision makers and the societal
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And that's a threefold exit, and we'll get there soon.
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In terms of the general choreography of the short term, we must restore the rhythm of our
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All those things that we knew in Canada to be part of the daily bread must be restored
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with great deliberation, consideration, choreography, starting with the children in school, without
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It's one of the fundamental rhythms of the society.
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The rhythm of sport, of culture, of restaurant.
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All of that needs to be restored with, in my, in my preliminary assessment, with great
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energy, not zombying out of the condition as if we've been struck about the head five
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It's actually counterintuitive, but we need to punch back with high energy, not low
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We need to come out with a statement, very much like at the end of a war, there would
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We're talking about restoring the rhythm of society, which is deeply ingrained in us.
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We've forgotten how to live elegantly in Canada, and the committee, I hope, will give both
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the choreography and the courage to say, back we go.
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You know, we're a sophisticated, advanced, old society in political terms.
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We've been living inelegantly over the last two years.
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The inelegant living is not our, our default equilibrium.
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We're coming out, but we need a higher energy level to get out of there.
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We've stuck here, and we've created a storyline that is overly sentimental and self-congratulatory.
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No, we need to go higher, but that requires work.
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That requires more thinking, and that really requires energy push to get us to that higher,
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higher equilibrium that we enjoyed so much over the last hundred years.
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Now, when you talk about restoring that rhythm of society, are you talking about lifting things
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like mask mandates and vaccine passports and basically returning to life, you know, March
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1st, 2020, or even November 1st, 2020, or 2019, I guess?
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I think my own preliminary thinking and early thinking of the committee is, of course, there
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will be deliberate actions that say, we're back.
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We're not zombying, again, out of this where we say all of these legacy things that were
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there purposefully, sometimes competently, sometimes less competently, sometimes accidentally
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to manage the pandemic, that these are legacy items with which we'll need to learn to live.
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This is a deliberate statement that we're exiting and exiting in the full sense.
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And might I add, Andrew, that because we've had so many crises, we're not exiting back to
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That rhythm of 2019 should be there, but it will require that much more work to get out
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So the pandemic, in my assessment, will be the minor crises of our six or seven crises.
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And therefore, we require work across education.
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We have 200,000 children out of school permanently in Canada.
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We have huge tens of thousands of businesses that have disintegrated.
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We have a social crisis whereby you have to negotiate the norms, restaurant to restaurant,
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community to community, household to household, complete breakdown, and province to province,
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The civil services and political class of the country have not seen the country in two years.
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They don't know what's happening, except for on their Twitter feed or on Facebook or what they
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All of that rhythm needs to be restored by statement, deliberately, not accidentally.
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And the political class right now is slightly in the realm of deer in the headlight, a little
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And we will give them that direction and courage to effectuate that choreography that we're
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You just launched this committee this week formally.
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Have there been any political leaders provincially or federally that seem to be approaching this
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We're in touch with a lot of them, if not all of them, on both the political and scientific
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And of course, on the policy side, and we're strictly non-ideological, non-partisan, always
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Very much in the tradition of the Institute for 21st Century Questions, the mandate of
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And we will, I expect, give courage to the country to declare an exit in the coming months.
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Joining me is, of course, the chair of the Worldwide Commission to Educate All Kids, the
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president of the Institute for 21st Century Questions, and the co-chair of the Canada Science
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And I didn't mention him earlier, but the other co-chair is Dr. Quadmo Kiramatang, who's
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Thank you very much, Irvin, for your time today.
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Dr. Martha Fulford, who's been a solid advocate, especially on the school reopening aspect,
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does has Dr. Quadmo Kiramatang, who has the Quadcast, which is something you should definitely
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Again, he's been a doctor that's pushed back against a lot of those who just want lockdowns
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And also public policy people, former politicians, current politicians, people that have an eye
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for public policy, where a lot of the medical advisors and science advisors have not.
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One of the biggest problems I talked about earlier on in the pandemic was that people
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with a one-track focus on one particular outcome, who are unconcerned with economic outcome,
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unconcerned with child development and child welfare, and all of these other things, were
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directing policy based on one particular metric, which was an important one, but not something
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that you can take at the expense of all of these other things.
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So I would say we could probably expedite that exit from the pandemic sooner.
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Like I said a couple of weeks ago, the pandemic is over when people say it is.
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But I'm glad to see some intellectual and academic gravitas coming towards that perspective
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that politicians have to just put their line in the sand and say, you know what, we're
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My thanks to all of you for tuning in to The Andrew Lawton Show today.
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Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.