‘Long COVID’ afflicts the body politic

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This article was published 01/12/2021 (1783 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“LONG COVID” is the medical term for the lingering, ongoing effects of the virus on an individual’s body. While some sufferers bounce back quickly, others experience the debilitating impacts for weeks and months after.

That is what is going to happen to our collective body, the “body politic.” We have entered a period of political long COVID.

This pandemic is the most disruptive event of our collective lifetime. It has upended our places of work and worship. It has changed the very way we live. No human interaction has gone untouched in the past 20 months. There is no return to “normal,” in terms of exactly what was there before.

That includes politics and governments in Canada and Manitoba.

None of this was assured at the outset. The first wave of the pandemic mostly skirted Manitoba. The fourth wave has been more moderate here than in other provinces, thanks to a more cautious summer reopening and the earlier introduction of vaccine passports.

But Manitoba was hit hard in waves two and three, with strong social and political shocks.

The longer the pandemic continues, the more exposed we are to its political after-effects. Most obviously at risk from long COVID’s disruptive dynamic is the current Progressive Conservative government.

Manitoba has seen one change in political leadership already, and may well see another. A new right-of-centre political party, the Keystone Party, is threatening to form in direct response to the PC government’s handling of COVID-19. Like the virus itself, the role and reach of the state has mutated, from the classic pocketbook issues of higher or lower taxes to deeper questions of direct government control of societal norms and behaviours.

This incipient threat to conservative governments everywhere is real.

This is no abstract notion. After a year-plus of public-health orders governing what we can do, where we can do it and who we can do it with, trust between people and their governments is in short supply on both sides. The early days of being “all in this together” have given way to gimlet-eyed notions of self-interest.

Jointly suffering in common cause during the first wave is nowhere the same as suffering jointly in the fourth wave because someone refuses to get vaccinated.

But trust is a two-way street. Every public-health order prohibiting specific citizen behaviours is grounded, by definition, in a lack of trust in citizens doing the right thing on their own. While people are mistrusting government to do the right thing, governments have effectively been mistrusting citizens in return.

The longer this continues, the more deep-seated are the consequences for trust — the most essential lubricant in our political system.

“Together” is the province’s new premier’s trust-building watchword. It telegraphs a difference in style, if not yet in substance. It might succeed. After all, at the close of the first COVID-19 wave in fall of last year, when Manitobans felt that togetherness of effort, the PC government still led in the polls.

Her “together” plan to build trust with Manitobans is first and foremost to distance herself and her government from one unpopular policy or decision of, let it be said, her own government. With talk of a post-COVID-19 “Great Reset” and “Great Resignation” all the global rage, she is busy paddling the political rapids with a “Great Retreat.”

But what if she and her government are actually navigating the wrong current? Long COVID implies a whole different stream, not simply a different course. It implies a sea change in public attitudes toward what matters. A prescient captain will first spy, then steer, her ship of state to a new, safe and winning harbour.

The social schisms of vaccination and public-health orders have created political divides inside and outside government. The near-win — or near-loss, if you like — of the leadership contest is a clear reminder that this is the case. A new rural-based party challenging from the right is ripe to exploit this.

The government’s competence in addressing this remains unresolved, not unlike the party’s leadership contest itself. That mostly insipid affair was devoid of compelling new ideas for Manitoba’s future post-COVID-19. The two candidates vied between similar strains of incrementalism as the way forward.

Incrementalism is a necessary tactic to take down the political temperature. Its cautious nature suits the style of Manitoba’s new, traditionalist premier. But as pandemic shifts to endemic, it risks missing the big plays that will be required to get ahead of the post-COVID-19 curve.

David McLaughlin was Clerk of the Executive Council in the government of Manitoba in 2020-21. He was campaign manager for the PC Party of Manitoba in the 2016 and 2019 elections.