The parable of the boy who cried wolf has remained timeless as its lesson is as applicable today as it was over 2,500 years ago when Aesop wrote it. A tale told many ways yet always the same – embellish peril to encourage sympathy only to find that when real danger approaches, sympathy is lost.
Today’s digital world – a world hungry to monetize clicks – cries wolf with regularity. The ensuing addiction to hyperbole has skewed trust to the point where a person may trust an unverified source from social media more than a century-old institution of journalism like The Globe and Mail. Traditional media is not the only victim. Trust in public sectors has also eroded while the engine of industry is learning how challenging it can be to operate when businesses start to lose faith in their supply chain partners.
Trust is a catalyst for all transactions, both personal and professional. You are more likely to loan a tool to a neighbour for their DIY project than a stranger because you trust that they will return it. If your tool returns damaged, you are less likely to repeat the process the next time that neighbour asks.
The premise is no different on a large scale. When a firm is weighing options for capital expenditure, trust that the surrounding environment will be friendly to business for the life of the project is a critical consideration. If a particular jurisdiction is seen to be less stable and supportive, the resulting decrease in trust can hinder future economic growth. Trust is a key ingredient to many aspects of life, yet it is intangible – it cannot be bought and creates time to create. As a child, learning that your parents lost trust in you hurt more than any spanking I ever got; a reminder that trust lives in the emotional world where pain can linger, unlike acute pain. Our collective psyche has been significantly damaged over the past two years and the loss of collective trust will have ramifications for years to come. The blame for this erosion lies at the feet of the leaders who attempted to steer through this crisis using the winds of public opinion as their guidepost for what decision to reach for next. The scary thing is that leaders here in Canada show no signs of ceasing this dangerous practice.
The continued devotion to mandating vaccines shows an abject failure to understand the reality of humanity – humans are not homogenous by design. Each of us has a unique genome to start with – we are the only copy and when we die that copy will never be repeated. The magic of our species is the ability to believe in common goals and the promise that we can advance our own station in life by participating in cooperative activities. The more each of us question our ability to prosper ‘within the system,’ the more difficult it will be for society to operate.
In our COVID-charged world, some lack empathy for (and may even seek retribution from) unvaccinated individuals because our leaders have repeated a message that they are solely to blame for the continued COVID situation. The Omicron variant exposed what pig farmers have known since the beginning – vaccines are a very important tool for maintaining population health, but they were never going to eradicate all risks associated with a fast-mutating, easily-transmissible respiratory virus. The distillation of a complex issue like COVID into binary responses creates unrealistic and oversimplified expectations, such as the belief that if only 100 per cent of people were vaccinated then all would be finally safe. At this point of the pandemic, ignorance to the complex nature of humanity is far more dangerous than your unvaccinated uncle.
A failure to understand that humans don’t react as a monolithic blob is intensifying pre-existing conditions that plagued us long before COVID flew in from afar. We fire a person from a role that only months before was considered essential, then complain of labour shortages in the same sector. If the federal Ministry of Labour follows through on its pledge to implement mandated vaccines for all federally-regulated sectors, the current cost increases from the decreased supply of cross-border trucking will be just the beginning. Canada’s food system was a world leader in modern value chain management. We enjoy some of the most affordable food in the world and have robust export markets, in part because of the just-in-time movement of goods that permeates throughout the chain. Every new shock to this system, whether it is government policy or otherwise, further stresses a system that was close to a breakpoint prior to the pandemic.
The loss of trust is as rampant as the virus itself. Young parents no longer trust a minister of education when they say school will be open Monday and rightfully so. Businesses cannot trust that a government will not introduce regulations that cause them to lose their ability to create jobs and earn a livelihood and rightfully so. People no longer trust that journalists can create an environment for educated debate and discourse and rightfully so. At every turn trust has been eroded – a priceless resource of which a true value cannot be calculated.
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Stewart Skinner is a local business owner, former political candidate, and has worked at Queen’s Park as a Policy Advisor to the Minister of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs. He can be reached at stewart@stonaleenfarms.ca or on Twitter: @modernfarmer.
