Constructive and Democratic Discourse

I’ve struggled to write something about the Manning report. It opens with “an appeal that [the Report’s] content be the subject of “constructive and democratic discourse” rather than the negative and rancorous discourse that increasingly characterizes public debate of important issues in an age of political polarization and cancel culture.”

I can get on board with this sentiment, though the mention of ‘cancel culture’ does put me on alert. But certainly, as we try to put things back together in the aftermath of the acute stage of the pandemic, constructive and democratic discourse is what’s required.

Democracy requires empathy: a genuine attempt to see things through the eyes of fellow citizens who do not share one’s own experience and perspective. Certainly, an elder statesman brought in to write a report about the way forward after the divisions of the pandemic would make every effort to understand the multiple perspectives on and experiences of the pandemic. Right?

If that’s the bar for ‘democratic discourse’ the Manning report fails abysmally. Nowhere in the report is sympathy expressed for the thousands of Albertans who have died of COVID, or those who mourn them. Nowhere in the report do we read about the experiences of health care workers, teachers and other front-line workers who have been disabled by long COVID. Those Albertans don’t even warrant a mention in the 114 page report.

The only Albertans deserving of empathy, or a public policy response, according to the report, are those who felt their freedoms were unduly restricted. A search for the words “dead,” “deaths” and “fatalities” yields six mentions. A search for the word “freedom” finds 262.

Had the Manning panel bothered to look at any of the publicly-available survey data, it would have found that those who felt restrictions were too stringent were in the minority. Unfortunately, there was a remarkable lack of both curiosity and empathy in the panel’s approach.

And this is where we are in Alberta. We live in different realities: some of us lived through a pandemic with a belief that we should minimize loss of life and disability. For us, every occupied ICU bed was a failure of public health. Others lived through a pandemic with a belief that freedom was paramount; life should go on as normal and the ICUs should be expanded to receive the collateral damage. Both those views should be present in a democratic conversation about how we move forward from the pandemic. Sadly, in Manning and Smith’s Alberta, only one perspective is given voice.

Manning had an opportunity to surprise us, to rise to the occasion and try to find ways to mend the divisions left behind by the pandemic. Instead, he delivered a wandering report that includes some reasonable recommendations (clarifying accountabilities in a public health emergency), some predictable comfort for those who felt oppressed (amendments to the Human Rights Act and the like), and some truly bizarre recommendations (truant officers empowered to ensure we send kids to school in the next pandemic).

I hope that the day will come when there is a “constructive and democratic discourse” about the pandemic in Alberta, about what went right and what went wrong. But with the Manning report on the books as the province’s look backward, I suspect the opportunity has been missed.