Quebec Author Details Worrisome Aspects of Canada’s Response to COVID in New Book

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Nora Loreto is not one of the half measures.

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The Quebec City journalist, writer, and social activist likes to tackle a topic and explore it with all the tools at her disposal, and as of March 2020 the perfect opportunity presented itself. The result is his second book, Spin Doctors: How the Media and Politicians Misdiagnosed the COVID-19 Pandemic (Fernwood Publishing, 368 pages, $ 35), a comprehensive, passionate, and highly readable work that details how a confluence of factors created a perfect storm of denial and unpreparedness.

The book covers some of the crucial antecedents of the pandemic, including Canada’s national amnesia regarding the 1918 influenza pandemic; the drastic cut in social spending by the Chrétien-Martin government in 1995; and the dismantling of the Global Public Health Intelligence Network, the initiative of the Public Health Agency of Canada and the World Health Organization created as an early warning system for the spread of viruses. In a cruel irony, that happened just a few months before the arrival of COVID-19.

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“I think that’s the biggest scandal in this entire pandemic,” Loreto said. “However, it was almost not fully reported.”

Loreto denounces the spread in the early stages of the pandemic of what she calls the “myth of individual responsibility,” according to which the emphasis of both the government and the media on things like masking and distancing, though clearly helpful to micro level, it also served to obscure more important causal problems. The result, he writes, has been a corrosive social atomization that makes class divisions and economic inequalities, with their disproportionate impact on minorities and the most vulnerable members of society, even more apparent.

“We’ve seen it over and over again,” Loreto said. “Anywhere there was a crack in social solidarity, COVID entered and caused damage.”

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A theme that ties together the broad chapters of the book is the need to resist the urge to go it alone.

“In a pandemic, we need community responses and approaches. We can’t just do it on an individual level. And that’s one place where we see journalism fail: by mapping out what COVID looks like in the neighborhood spread. When you have a school that has a massive outbreak, that school is a warning sign. It says that something is happening in that community. But where are the analytics that make links, like (the fact that) 20 percent of parents work in a certain industry, and that schools, and residential care facilities, are nodes? By (over) personalizing the stories, those connections become invisible. “

But surely it is important to tell personal stories in the middle of a pandemic?

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“Yes, but in an ideal world we would have enough journalists to do those stories and also to walk away. But we don’t, so often if there is a person in the rhythm of COVID, they will talk about the compelling human stories. That can put readers in the position of being passive observers. It does not translate into any demand for changes in public policies, and that is very sad ”.

In his examination of the food processing industry, and elsewhere, Loreto shows how putting substantive considerations before employee safety, an already desperate situation is truly tragic. One way of reporting to correct that, Loreto said, would be to “consistently name the establishment owners and their profits. In the meatpacking industry, for example, we learned about working conditions and wages (in workplaces where outbreaks were occurring), but we never learned about the profits that companies were making, and that’s part of it. very important story “.

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Despite all the discouraging scenarios it presents, Loreto shows some optimism, just a little maybe, but that’s much better than nothing.

“It is the reality of the times we live in that politicians seem absolutely immovable. There is very little connection between organizing and forcing politicians to change things. The pandemic is a catalytic moment, a traumatic incident. It’s going to change people in some way. Exactly how it’s not obvious, and it won’t be until we can say, ‘Okay, we’re out of this.’ But it will create a reckoning with democracy, and politicians will either say, ‘My God, we have a problem and we must respond to it,’ or they will refuse and continue to lock themselves up. And the choice they make will indicate the kind of action that will be required in the next decade to force politicians to finally listen to the people again. ”

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