The really good news about last week’s Ontario election is that its citizens remain pragmatic, rather than dogmatic.

Voters didn’t re-elect Doug Ford’s government because they absolutely love it or passionately believe in it. They voted for it because they felt that is the best they could do considering other choices.

Ontario voters always have placed pragmatism above party loyalty. When they felt Conservatives could govern better than others, they voted them in. Ditto Liberals and New Democrats. 

Ontario even elected a United Farmers Party back in 1919. They might not have really liked the party, nor its politicians, but they felt that was the best they could do at the time.

Dumping party loyalty voting for pragmatic voting is a good thing because party loyalty often breeds fanaticism. Whatever your party believes and does, you stand by it whether it is good for the citizens or not.

 
Look at the United States. Democrats and Republicans are so frozen into their parties’ opposing beliefs that the country has become ungovernable. Its citizens are suffering because the parties refuse to step off the party line.

Party tribalism in that country has made it impossible to control gun violence, despite more than 250 mass shootings this year. That’s an average of roughly 1.5 mass shootings (four or more people shot dead) every day.

Meanwhile, the really bad news about last week’s Ontario election was the low voter turnout. Only 43 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot compared to 57 per cent in 2018.

When the math is done, that huge Progressive Conservative majority chosen to govern the province for the next four years was elected by just 18 per cent of all eligible Ontario voters.

That low vote, the lowest in the province’s history, is being attributed to voter apathy. Many potential voters did not see the Ford government as excellent. Nor did they see it as a disaster. They saw no need for a change, so were not motivated to vote.

The sad fact is not only was the majority of eligible voters not motivated to vote, they were not prepared. Most of us, whether we vote or not, are not well informed when choosing our governments.

We see a few manipulative political TV ads, follow uneducated voices on social media and listen to our friends, most of whom are no better informed than we are. We like style more than substance.

We don’t spend time seriously studying the issues or the candidates and their leaders. That’s why the world in general has so many mediocre politicians, and leaders who would have trouble running a peanut stand.

I blame our education systems. They fail to educate our children about the critical importance of selecting governments and leaders, or how to think deeply and critically in deciding who to elect.

As the American comedian Bill Maher said on TV the other night: People are so dumb (he used other words that I can’t use here) you wonder how a country can continue to exist.

We need education systems that provide strong courses in civics. Systems that teach our children the importance of quality leadership and what qualities to look for in good leaders. And, how to focus on substance instead of style when deciding who you want to lead you.

We need to elect people with the backbone to reject party policy when they think it is wrong. People who do what they think is right, not what the party wants. People who reject the party line even if it makes them outliers and costs them votes.

I’m not saying the few voters who did cast ballots last week elected the right or wrong government. I don’t have a preference. I’ve voted for each of the major parties at one time of another.

I am saying that whatever governments we do elect, must be better. 
The potential catastrophes facing our current and future world are unprecedented.

 
We have the resources and the ingenuity to fight them. What we don’t have are well-informed and engaged electorates to vote in governments and leaders who will bring fearless excellence to the fight.

 
Better education in civics can give us that.

Canada is a much lesser country than it used to be.

COVID-19 has done that. We Canadians have allowed COVID-19 to reduce our country to a third-world type player barely able to look after itself.

We have stood by and watched the politicians fumble and stumble through the greatest medical crisis of modern times. They decided to play a compromise game with the virus and they lost.

They tried negotiating a deal that would see the fewest number of Canadians sickened and killed by the virus with the least amount of harm to the economy. We stood by and watched.

Viruses don’t negotiate. They need to be killed before they get into the game.

To be fair to the politicians, they had an unenviable task. An unenviable task made impossible by a hyper-partisan political climate that puts election, power and re-election above all else.

They allowed politics into a place it should never be – a widespread medical emergency.

Job one of our elected representatives in a national medical emergency is to pull people together to understand what has to be done, accept what has to be done and join the effort to get it done. To pull the general public on side, politicians need to have their trust.

The public gives its trust to those who show strong knowledge and command of the problem that needs fixing. Neither Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, nor Ontario Premier Doug Ford, showed any strong knowledge of the COVID-19 virus and its pandemic potential.

In the 14 months since the pandemic was declared, neither man has done one thing to stop COVID-19’s spread. Trudeau has done nothing but tell us about the millions of vaccine doses he has ordered. Ford has done nothing but tell us what a poor job Trudeau has done in getting vaccines distributed.

The fact that Canadian politicians were so unprepared for this national emergency is inexcusable because Canada had a wealth of virus knowledge gathered during the SARS pandemic of 2003. The SARS outbreak was small compared to COVID-19, sickening a known 8,000 people worldwide, killing close to 800. However, it left us important lessons on how to prepare for and battle the much-predicted next killer virus outbreak.

Canadians and their politicians choose to forget, or simply ignore, the lessons of SARS.

The Ontario SARS Commission, appointed to investigate the outbreak and make recommendations for the future, found that the most important lesson of SARS was about the precautionary principle.

Here’s what the commission wrote in its final report:

“Perhaps the most important lesson of SARS is the importance of the precautionary principle. SARS demonstrated over and over the importance of the principle that we cannot wait for scientific certainty before we take reasonable steps to reduce risk. This principle should be adopted as a guiding principle throughout Ontario’s health, public health and worker safety systems.

“If we do not learn this and other lessons of SARS . . . we will pay a terrible price in the face of future outbreaks of virulent disease, whether in the form of foreseen outbreaks like flu pandemics or unforeseen ones, as SARS was.”

This was not the first time that Canadians and their politicians had heard this. The same warning was issued by the Krever Commission into Canada’s tainted blood supply in the early 1990s.

The message was clear: when public health is seriously threatened, do not wait for all the evidence before taking action. Hitting fast and hard with stringent lockdowns and other unpopular tools would have lessened the virus’ spread.

Following the precautionary principle more than one year ago would have been unpopular. Businesses would have been shut down, jobs lost. There would have been pain, but we probably would not have suffered the way we are suffering now with one million-plus cases, 24,000 deaths and a completely shattered economy.

Yes, we are a lesser country now and we will continue to be until we begin to choose leaders who have the knowledge and strength needed to build the trust needed to bring us all together in solving our problems. Leaders for whom re-election is a lesser goal than getting done what needs to be done.

Politicking in Anger

Many years ago I was coached not to write anything in anger. Anger allowed to chill makes for cooler thoughts and prudent words. 

I have tried to follow that advice over the past week.

What sparked my recent anger was Premier Doug Ford’s unintelligent and short-sighted remarks about mainstream journalists becoming irrelevant in today’s Ontario society. He accused journalists of being “far-left” and intent on deliberately distorting the messages of politicians. 

He said he bypasses professional news media and delivers his government’s news and views directly to the people through social media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. 

That’s a common howl among the world’s demagogues – a twisted opinion that unfortunately is spreading during a time of huge change and trauma in journalistic organizations. And it is an opinion supported by little evidence, and certainly no facts, except for those that demagogues invent for themselves. 

I am a part of a family of journalists, have been a journalist all of my life, have many friends that are journalists and have worked with journalists whose health and happiness has been damaged by their dedication to doing their job. So I find Ford’s remarks insulting and hurtful. 

People could care less about how those remarks affect me or any other individual journalist. They should, however, care about how they affect journalism, a fundamental element of democracy. 

The journalist’s job can be explained in two simple words: Observe and report. And observe and report as fairly and honestly as is humanly possible. 

Journalists are not perfect and sometimes slip off track. So do doctors, truck drivers, lawyers, grocery store clerks, or anyone doing a job. But in any job, deliberate intent to distort and do damage is rare. 

And because people are not perfect, there are checks and balances in their jobs. The work of journalists is monitored by editors and by press-media councils that administer codes of practice and investigate complaints from the public. Most journalistic organizations work under some form of code of conduct. 

There are no editors, no codes of practice, no monitoring for facts and fairness in social media. Social media can be a helpful connecting point between family and friends, but generally is an open sewer often used by people with diarrhea of the brain. 

It takes zero research, little critical thinking, and just a few seconds to write a 240-character blurb on Twitter, or a fast post on Facebook. It takes hours of interviews, research and writing to produce a 500-word balanced report on government changes to autism funding.

Many politicians don’t like the traditional, professional media because it does not always produce stories they like. They want to see and hear only stories about them that have favourable spin.

John Stackhouse, former editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail, addressed this back in 2013 before the Ontario Press Council: 

“It is the responsibility of journalists to document facts that perhaps those leaders don’t want to be known. . . but the voting public and society at large needs to know much more than what elected officials want published. Ultimately it is up to the public to decide what to do with the information, but journalists need to be impartial witnesses and publish as much reasonable and defensible information as they can so that citizens, who do not have access to the same resources to question and challenge authority, can make up their own minds.”

Stackhouse made that statement while responding to complaints about Globe and Mail and Toronto Star coverage of the Ford family.

Certainly Premier Ford does not want to read or hear the stories questioning the fairness of having a buddy appointed commissioner of the OPP. Nor would he have liked the reporting of the public criticism that forced his government to back down on changes to autism funding. 

Getting the government’s news and views to the public through social media didn’t seem to help him in those two instances.

My guess is that those two cases had him angry when he stood before a convention of conservative thinkers last week and said professional journalists are losing the battle to inform people. 

I guess he never had a coach who warned him about writing or speaking in anger. Anger and bias are poor substitutes for critical thinking and facts. 

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