What if the truckers win?
Since covid, the political climate of the conservative party has shifted towards populism. We need to be prepared for the next pandemic.
I’m writing this a couple of days after Anthony Fauci was brought before a hostile American Senate committee where he was accused of creating covid and told he should be in prison. Former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States, Fauci was the reluctant poster-boy for controversial policies aimed at reducing the spread of covid.
I know you don’t want to think about the pandemic. I don’t either. But a significant amount of our politics – from the re-election of Donald Trump to Alberta separatism – is downstream of covid, including the public perception and federal responses to it. Fauci’s grilling gives us an opportunity to take stock of what we learned from covid.
Alberta separatism
Even in Canada, I fear that the key lesson some politicians have learned from the pandemic is that it is less political trouble for them to let people die than it is to do what’s necessary to keep them alive. After a brief period of near-consensus that we need to make sacrifices for the sake of the vulnerable, backlash against covid mask mandates, vaccine passports and school closures led to political headache after political headache. In 2022, the trucker convoy choked the national capital and provoked the federal government to invoke the Emergencies Act to clear them out, the aftermath of which is still felt today. In Alberta, insurgent rural populists (many of whom later became key figures in today’s separatism movement) removed Jason Kenney from the premiership. Those same populist forces have continued to exert outsized power in Alberta politics and may even threaten the premiership of Danielle Smith, their hand-picked successor to Kenney, unless she continues to facilitate their demands.
Destabilized politics
The political cost of trying to slow the pandemic, preserve our health care system and protect the vulnerable is an ongoing battle with conspiracism, populism and intractable resentment. It has destabilized our politics and empowered social actors and movements that are largely out of touch with reality. In the U.S., these forces are in power. In Canada, they have outsized influence. I worry that mainstream politicians are going to be very hesitant to face the costs the next time we face a pandemic, especially right-leaning politicians who are vulnerable to internal threats from a populist base. If the next pandemic strikes under a conservative leadership influenced by populist rhetoric, the severity of infection rates and mortality might increase.
This isn’t to say that conservatism is inherently hostile to public health. A basic commitment of modern conservatism is that protecting public safety is a first duty of government. There is no reason why criminals and external invaders are relevant threats to the salus populi, but viruses aren’t. But since covid, the power relations within conservative parties are being reshaped such that we should be genuinely worried about who will be in power when the next pandemic hits.
The party of peace, order and good government should make up the bulwark of public health policy. Only when these values are upheld by the governing power and the public body can we hope to survive another pandemic and come out the other end stronger.
