Category: News

Risk is all of our business and we make decisions about it every day but not all risk decisions are created equal. There are some decisions that really bring risk home and set off sirens, particularly when they involve kids. On the @risk podcast, I spoke with four parents about their decision to return their children to in-person learning in public schools during the pandemic.Hear how these parents carried out their risk decision-making responsibilities during a September unlike any other. We explore their policy ideas for what could have made the decision easier and better informed, and consider how to move towards a safer, more equitable and better functioning public education system.

You’ll hear from Jill Promoli, a wedding and lifestyle photographer, a parent of three children and flu shot advocate. She became a flu vaccine advocatefollowing the death of her young son, Jude, from Influenza B causing cardiac arrest. Jill wants to see paid sick days deployed to fight infectious diseases in our schools and workplaces. Lauren Dobson Hughes is a consultant specializing in gender, health and rights and a single parent to her daughter. She’s fed up with government leaders leaning on women to solve their public policy failures. Regina Bateson is a political scientist and visiting professor at the University of Ottawa and parent to three boys. She implores us to remember the short and long term equity implications arising from insufficient support of our public education system. Mike Moffat is an Assistant Professor in the Business, Economics and Public Policy group at Ivey Business School, Western University and the Senior Director of Policy and Innovation at the Smart Prosperity Institute and parent to two children. He wants governments to communicate better with parents and to meet them where they are. The children of all four parents are back to in person learning at elementary school (sorta*). I’m a parent too who sent her elementary school and high school aged children back to in person learning (sorta*).

In speaking with these parents, it became clear to me that there really was no choice about back to school. For many, sending their kids back to school was an absolute necessity in order to meet work obligations, as was the case for Lauren. And for parents of younger children, there is literally no evidence supporting the effectiveness of virtual education. Some children also need the psycho-social benefits that can only come from in-person learning more than others; the reading, writing and arithmetic is on par or secondary for some, like Mike Moffat’s children.

Further, for something to be a choice, the decision-maker needs to have access to and understand the information relevant to both options. All of the parents felt that there were key pieces of information missing, like class sizes, as well as a lack of transparency around how the government planned to manage community transmission throughout the school year. For example, New York State published guidelines that indicated schools could reopen only if daily community transmission rates stayed at 5% or lowerbased on a 14-day average and schools would close if the regional infection rate rises above 9 percent, using a 7-day average, after August 1. That’s clear guidance.

Even if there were perfect information and a more viable virtual learning alternative, it was still an impossible decision. It was impossible because for many parents the option of virtual versus in-person learning in school came down to a choice between: the health of their elderly parents or the health of their children; a child’s mental health or physical health; and financial security or physical safety. It was also about whether the sacrifices in the spring and summer were for naught or for a better tomorrow. Those are some serious sunk costs, coupled with no good options.

Last, some of the parents felt that opting for virtual learning could undermine the future of the in person public education system. In an interview with Piya Chattopadhyay on CBC Radio’s The Sunday Magazine, Charles Pascal describes public education as the best investment a society can make and Regina Bateson in conversation with me points out that no country ever regrets investing in public education. Robust public education systems contribute to more just and healthier societies, not just for the few but for the many. For the parents I spoke with and for myself, sending our kids back to school was a vote for and investment in the greater long-term good of public education despite our immediate safety concerns.

When deciding whether to send their kids back to school was an impossible uninformed non-choice. The worst kind of risk scenario in many respects.

Risk is a team sport but there always needs to be a risk owner. That owner can work to avoid the risk, to mitigate it or to transfer it. When it comes to a safe school year, the risk owner has to be the level of government that not only holds the purse strings and sets the standards for education but does the same for public health in the school jurisdiction, as Lauren ably argues. We all have great sympathy for the battlefield conditions in which governments and policy makers are operating. Nevertheless looking back and living through it, it does look and feel like the government tried to transfer risks associated with school reopening to parents. Without the autonomy to control influential factors, the necessary information upon which to base a decision or any effective alternative to in-person learning for so many parents across Ontario, the risks associated with back to school were more transferred and downloaded than assumed by choice.

School systems around the world have reopened and the Commonwealth Fund provides a good overview of the learnings gained from across these experiences. But it was only after examining a school reopening experience much closer to home did I gain real clarity on how much better it could have been handled. On the Ahkameyimok Podcast with National Chief Perry Bellegarde, National Chief speaks with the Chief Executive Officer of the First Nations Health Managers Association, Marion Crowe, about COVID-19 and Back to School. In their discussion a few key themes emerged. Departmental and jurisdictional silos are barriers to the best decisions. The First Nations Health Managers Association offers a COVID-19 information resource hotline, InfoPoint, open to health managers across 634 First Nations across Canada and it contains information related to school openings, not just traditional health care guidance. One consolidated information resource; not six-hundred and thirty-four and not one for education and another for health. National Chief and Ms Crowe also highlighted how the mental health needs of parents have been taken into account in plans to return to the classroom. Innovations around handwashing measures and desk barriers at Chief Paskwa Education Centre in Saskatchewan are good examples. These creative measures ease the anxiety of parents because they communicate that children’s safety is being prioritized. I’ve shared just a few of the smart innovations and policies discussed on the podcast, all of which were developed and deployed in a much more resource constrained context.

Remember in the before times when we all could gather closely together to listen to live music? One of my favourite concert memories is from the Stardust Picnic at Fort York in Toronto in 1998. Blue Rodeo played on a perfect summer evening. On their playlist was Diamond Mine. Why do I bring this up in the context of fumbled public school re-openings? Sing it, Greg:

Nothing’s as obvious as what is lost

Nothing’s as painful as the cost

I like the suggestion of Mike Moffatt and Regina Bateson: policy makers must take a hard look at what’s not working now and bring in communications swat teams; and they need to start planning now for how we make up the gaps being created today during this period of pandemic disruption. Jimmy Sarakatsannis of McKinsey observes that there are reports out of China of significant numbers of students self-reporting symptoms of depression or other mental health challenges following school closures and in the United States they expect students will lose at least six months of learning or more. As Lauren Dobson-Hughes rightly points out, the PTA can’t address these problems. We cannot afford governments and policymakers waiting for the pandemic to be over to act. The hard, detailed work needs to start now and then be piloted, practiced and rehearsed. In other words, our best risk-thinking needs to be applied by the proper risk owner to solve today’s public education challenges and avoid long-term negative outcomes. Let’s not wait for the system to be lost, for future generations to bear the costs and for all of us to be faced with further impossible uninformed non-choices.

Please subscribe to the @risk podcast and share with me your back to school experience or even your favourite concert!

*Mike Moffatt’s daughter’s school closed for two weeks due to an outbreak at the time of recording and my entire family is at home in quarantine while we wait for the results of a COVID-19 test at the time of release of the podcast.

Jodi Butts, host of @Risk

“Return to Tomorrow” is neither the best nor best-known episode of the original Star Trek series. Episode 20 in Season 2 is remarkable in a few ways however. It’s where the track of Spock saying “pure energy” comes from that ends up in Information Society’s 1984 synth-pop hit “What’s on Your Mind.” Remarkably as well both Kirk and Spock die in this episode. (SPOILER: only to be revived!) Most interesting to me, it’s the episode that addresses risk most directly.

The Starship Enterprise’s mission is well known (say it with me and Kirk): “Its five year mission, To explore strange new worlds, To seek out new life, And new civilizations, To boldly go where no man has gone before.” That mission is front and centre in “Return to Tomorrow”, which explores the meaning and value of life and the appropriate level of risk worth taking to achieve your mission. Kirk, Spock and Lt Commander Ann Mulhall are asked to surrender their bodies to an advanced and powerful species.

We find the Enterprise in space past any point where any human being has previously been. They have encountered what appears to be a dead planet but soon receive an invitation from a being of pure energy named Sargon to transport down to the planet. Kirk notifies the Federation that he has accepted the invitation, electing to “risk the potential dangers”, noting the message won’t reach the Federation for another three weeks. They’re flying without a net so to speak. While Kirk would like his First Officer and Science Officer, Spock, to join him, he says he “can’t risk both of us off the ship.” Sargon has unique means of persuasion available to him so Spock ends up being unable to refuse joining the Captain. When the landing party assembles in the transport room, Scotty expresses reservations, worried the party may dematerialize in solid rock. Spock confirms the landing coordinates are for a chamber, brushing the concern aside. To Spock, Scotty’s concerns were illogical. Dr. McCoy is hesitant but reluctantly joins. Sargon prevents the security guards from being beamed down, leaving only Kirk, Spock, Bones and Lt. Cmdr. Ann Mulhall transported to the planet. That seems like a bad sign, no?

There on the planet, the landing party finds luminous spheres containing the lives of three powerful telepathic beings: Sargon, Henoch and Thalassa. They seek to borrow the bodies of Kirk, Spock and Mulhall so that they may temporarily use them to build humanoid robots to permanently house their beings. Their bodies and their planet was destroyed when, in Sargon’s words, their species “dared to think of ourselves as gods.” In other words, to mistakenly believe they could live their lives beyond the reach of risk.

On the Enterprise, the team debates their choice. Lt. Cmdr. Mulhall wants to proceed in the name of “science”. Dr. McCoy is uneasy, describing their power relationship as between “giants” and “insects”. Kirk insists the decision be made on consensus, even though he could easily order it. He instead tries to persuade the others to accept renting their bodies to this powerful and unknown species in a very Willaim T Kirkesque speech. He begins by saying human progress depends on individual people taking risks. He then acknowledges that McCoy’s threat assessment is sound, but points out that the possibilities for good — the potential for knowledge and advancement — are at least as great. With voice raised, Captain Kirk declares: ‘Risk: Risk is our business. That’s what this starship is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her.”

The experiment proceeds. Henoch attempts to hijack the exercise by trying to keep Spock’s body forever. With advanced powers and dedication to honouring his word, Sargon saves the day. He kills Henoch and embraces Thalassa one last time while they still inhabit Kirk’s and Mulhall’s bodies. They then abandon their plans to become robot overlords, electing to return to and remain in their pure energy forms.

Commander Chris Hadfield grew up watching Star Trek and has gone on to spend his entire life @ risk or as he more precisely says on the inaugural episode of the @ risk podcast “being careful with risk.” After speaking with Commander Hadfield, it is abundantly clear that risk is a choice and often a team sport. Commander Hadfield has faced many difficult choices and worked exceptionally hard to be in the position of having to make them. He has worked with many colleagues who he has called friend and has tragically lost some of them along the way.

Commander Hadfield implores us to be clear eyed about the risks you accept, like Spock, as that usually makes you safer and practice helps with that. Like Kirk extolls, Commander Hadfield shares risk is best understood in the context of purpose; otherwise we are just daredevils or paralyzed “little chihuahuas,” pursuing or avoiding risk for the sake of it. It’s also equally important to appreciate and enjoy the journey while in pursuit of your goals, as not all of your goals may be reached. Sometimes there’s risk without any reward except for the joy gained from the effort and Commander Hadfield consistently invests close attention to being present at all times.

We are not gods and risk is what in part makes us human. Risk is therefore unavoidably all of our business, not just the stuff of Starship Captains and International Space Station Commanders. Enjoy my conversation with the extraordinary Col. Chris Hadfield and draw on its many risk lessons relatable to our more earthy daily lives. Listen to the inaugural episode of the @ risk podcast here: playpodca.st/risk

Jodi Butts, host of @Risk

Welcome to @Risk. Truth be told, you have always been living at risk found at the intersection of magnitude and probability but you’re probably just much more aware of it now.

I want to thank you for listening to the special COVID-19 series podcast that I had the pleasure of producing on the 2020 Network, starting at the outset of the pandemic (C19cast). And I truly mean thank you and to all of my guests as the podcast helped me make sense of what was so rapidly unfolding around us, in terms of our evolving understanding of the virus; our clinical response to preparing for it and managing it; the economic consequences; and the human costs.

The pandemic is not over, likely far from it, and so of course its impacts continue to be felt in our homes, our learning and work environments, around the world. So as I set to resume podcasting in September, we could continue to discuss pandemic trajectory and effects and the Canadian road to recovery. And we will but COVID-19 won’t be the lens through which we examine important issues of the day this time — that nasty bug may still make me physically distance from my friends but it’s had enough air time. During the C19cast, we on multiple occasions also adopted a public health approach to discuss topics like firearm regulation, health equity and anti-Black racism. And that is an important and useful way to think about how we mount responses to challenging issues that threaten our health. While health is a fundamental condition in which we humans build and live our lives, I think there is another essential takeaway from this crisis that I would like to explore with you instead and that is: what other risks are we not thinking about, preparing for, and understanding better and how can we be build for resilience for the unknown unknown or for a low-probability big-impact event?

In my conversation with New York Times best-selling author of books about psychology and decision-making, Dan Gardner, about thinking during a pandemic in the C19cast series, he was pretty unequivocal: humans don’t think about risk well. It relates back to our psychology. We tend to crowdsource our risk assessments, overly guided by other people’s choices being the social creatures that we are. We often discount the likelihood of a risk event even as its probability rises; the probability of a certain event only grows as more time passes and yet we think less and less about the eventuality. We don’t typically use science, statistics and logic; we tend to favour our emotions and experiences. All of this means, we will probably over prepare for a pandemic now due to recency bias, just as we did for terrorist attacks after 9–11 as discussed on the C19cast with Ben Rhodes, New York Times best-selling author and former advisor to President Barack Obama.

COVID-19 has taken so much from us — human lives, businesses, large in-person gatherings, huge swaths of prosperity and equity — but we have not lost all of our progress, our economy marches on and we continue to enjoy life, liberty and security of the person (some more than others). An important lesson of COVID-19 is that we must do more to protect what we have during these dynamic and challenging times. Do you really value something if you’re not thinking about how you could lose it? Please join me @Risk, a new show on the 2020 Network, brought to you by Interac, and let’s think about risk better together.

Subscribe: http://ow.ly/1aZM50BtPXS

Jodi Butts, host of @Risk