Trust ‘best antidote’ to province’s pandemic communications strategy

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This article was published 16/01/2021 (1784 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Throughout its COVID-19 pandemic response, the Pallister government has dodged questions and delayed answers as the public grapples for clear information — a “disastrous” communications strategy, experts say.

“What the public most needs in COVID time is honest, accurate information we can trust,” said Arthur Schafer, professor of bioethics and founding director of the Centre for Professional & Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba.

“Public trust is the most valuable resource a government has, and in order to gain that trust, the government has to be trustworthy — and our (Manitoba) government seldom appears to be.”

In recent weeks, the province has been criticized for its communication on its vaccine roll-out.

The Free Press reported provincial officials were consistently unable to provide data on how many immunizers had been hired and how many were needed. After weeks of withholding details on its vaccination roll-out plans, the province held a 30-minute news briefing Wednesday — but took questions for just 15 minutes.

On Friday, the province announced its plan to vaccinate all long-term care home residents by the end of January would not be complete until mid-February.

In past months, business owners and parents of school-age children waiting on restriction re-evaluations, including the most recent round announced Jan. 8, have had to wait until the last minute for indication of changes to come.

Lorian Hardcastle, an associate professor in the University of the Calgary’s faculties of law and medicine, said Manitoba’s government has not been alone in its reluctance to provide transparency but noted its lack can create consequences on the public health front.

On a practical level, Hardcastle said businesses and parents have had to navigate several last-minute change of plans or confusion over rapidly changing rules. More broadly, she said, compliance to public health orders relies heavily on public trust.

“When the government holds things back that later come out it creates distrust in the public,” she said Thursday. “The public has to trust the government in order to comply with public health restrictions.”

Hardcastle said compliance requires both enforcement and trust, but since enforcement teams cannot watch all people at all times, trust becomes key.

In Manitoba, Schafer pointed to the “hopelessly ineffective” roll-out of testing sites and contact tracing early in the pandemic and the current “unforgivably slow” deployment of vaccines as examples of the shortfall.

“Failure to adequately inform the public, failure to earn the trust of the public by behaving in a trustworthy manner, failure to be accountable alienates people,” he said. “Instead of feeling trust in the government, they feel things are going awry and they don’t know why things are going awry.”

Even as Manitoba’s active COVID-19 cases begin to drop, Schafer and Hardcastle stressed public trust will be essential in both widespread immunization and ongoing testing, isolation and contact tracing.

While some will get the vaccine no matter what, and others won’t get the vaccine at all, a “whole group in the middle” is still making up their minds.

“Transparency around all things vaccine-related: safety, how it’s being procured, why we’re getting it at the speed we’re getting it, how it’s being rolled out — the more trust we can develop around vaccines and their distribution generally, the better it is to get people to get that vaccine,” Hardcastle said.

“The best antidote the government has to counteract the cynicism its actions and policies have created would be… to communicate with the public in an honest, open and accurate way, admit mistakes and share with us plans for the future,” Schafer said.

“And then regularly inform us of what’s going well, what’s not going well and how they’re planning to improve.”

julia-simone.rutgers@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @jsrutgers