Category: Blog

Much of what follows draws on well-known public health history and behavioural research, but the failure to integrate these insights has left vaccine debates stuck in the wrong register. And one of the frustrations in the vaccine debate is that both sides are, in a narrow sense, correct. Vaccines do work. The evidence is overwhelming. They reduce severe disease, hospitalization, and death. They train the immune system to recognize novel pathogens before those pathogens can overwhelm the body. This is not controversial science; it is settled biology, visible in everything from smallpox eradication to the differential outcomes of COVID-19 across populations. And yet, large numbers of people who are not ignorant, not conspiratorial, and not hostile to science still resist vaccination. Puzzlingly, many of them acknowledge that vaccines work —…

Ontario’s long-term care and retirement-care frameworks are built around a powerful moral claim: restraint is a last resort, autonomy must be preserved, and dignity requires the least restrictive environment possible. These principles are sound in the vast majority of cases. They emerged in response to real historical abuses, and they have rightly reshaped practice across the system. But policy failure does not always occur at the centre of a distribution. It can happen at its edge. There is a small, rarely acknowledged but growing category of dementia cases where Ontario’s current framework stops protecting dignity and starts protecting a narrative — a narrative that says restraint has been solved, risk can be managed, and autonomy can always be honoured if only we try hard enough. My mother reached that edge.…

Public debate about vaccines usually begins at the wrong level. It starts with moral judgments (“anti-science,” “irresponsible,” “misinformed”) rather than with an examination of how people actually reason about bodies, risk, evidence, and trust. Once framed that way, the debate hardens. One side defends science. The other defends autonomy. And neither side feels understood. Vaccine hesitancy is not best understood as ignorance or conspiracy thinking. It is better understood as a collision between population-level reasoning and individual-level experience—between how public health evaluates risk and how human beings live inside it. To move beyond the needle, we need to understand what people are objecting to, what kind of evidence they find unconvincing, and why reassurance so often backfires. Personal boundaries “Foreign matter” is not a scientific claim — it is a…

There is a familiar move in public debate that feels persuasive without ever quite settling into proof. It borrows the language of fairness, cites real numbers, and nods respectfully toward compassion. But the core question keeps shifting just as you think you’ve grasped it. By the time you reach the conclusion, something important has happened: you feel convinced without being sure of what, exactly, you’ve been shown. This is the intellectual equivalent of the carnival shell game. In the classic shell game (sorry: annoying video but he does explain it): There is one real object (the pea). The operator moves the shells, not the pea. The mark is encouraged to follow motion, not substance. The trick succeeds not through lying, but through misdirection and speed. At no point is the…

Robyn Urback’s argument for scaling back refugee health coverage under the Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP) rests on a familiar move in contemporary policy debate: the substitution of perception for evidence, and the quiet collapse of crucial distinctions that the law, the data, and basic fairness insist we keep separate. Her piece is careful, almost lawyerly, in tone. It cites numbers. It invokes cost-of-living pressures. It nods to compassion before turning to restraint. But beneath that surface is a conceptual sleight of hand that matters enormously for public policy: repeated equivocation between refugee claimants and refugees, and an unexamined appeal to what she twice calls the public “perception” that Canada’s refugee system is being abused. Refugees and refugee claimants Let’s start with the distinction she blurs. Refugee claimants are applicants.…

It happened in Montevideo, in the way small moments often do—casually, unselfconsciously, and therefore in a revealing way. A fellow passenger on a cruise, an American, had just finished admonishing a street vendor for not returning her change in U.S. dollars. She turned toward the harbour, pointed at what appeared to be a military ship—grey, angular, carrying the unmistakable silhouette of weaponry—and asked me, without hesitation or irony: “Is that one of ours?” I paused, not because I lacked an answer, but because the question itself seemed to require unpacking before it could be answered at all. Whose ours? Assumptions The question assumed several things at once. It assumed I was American. It assumed that nationality was audible. It assumed that Americans, wherever they go, are surrounded by other Americans…

We have spent years worrying about misinformation: false claims, fabricated statistics, outright lies. That concern, while justified, now risks missing the deeper epistemic or ‘knowledge’ failure unfolding in public life. Increasingly, the problem is not that facts are wrong, but that facthood itself is being narrowed, stripped of context, and weaponized in ways that make reasoned disagreement impossible. This is where decision-based evidence making meets Daniel Kahnemann’s quieter but equally corrosive failure: denominator neglect. True but meaningless Another Daniel — Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s reminder that people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts — assumed something that no longer reliably holds: that facts arrive intact, with their scale, probability, and relevance understood. In practice, facts now circulate as fragments, detached from base rates, denominators, and comparative…

Every generation invents a new language for its discontent. For many of today’s young people, that language is withdrawal. Across Canada and other rich countries, a growing share of youth are classified as NEET — Not in Employment, Education, or Training. Policymakers read the acronym as an economic problem. But the truth is more profound: the NEET generation is signaling a collective breakdown in how modern societies cultivate motivation, attention, and belonging. They are not “lost” or “lazy.” Many are simply overloaded — neurologically, cognitively, and emotionally — by institutions designed for a different brain and a different world. The new neural landscape Over the past two decades, diagnoses of ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, anxiety, and depression have risen sharply among youth. Some of that increase reflects better awareness, but…

Anyone who has dealt with a high pressure salesperson, a hard-nosed buyer, or an “experienced” auction intermediary will recognize the pattern. Compliment It begins with flattery. You are praised for your discernment. Your item is described as rare, interesting, even impressive. The seller establishes rapport by affirming your intelligence and taste. This is not incidental. The compliment lowers your guard and creates a subtle obligation to remain reasonable and cooperative. Devalue Then comes the turn. Despite its apparent value, you are told the item is “hard to place.” Demand is thin. The market is soft. There are flaws you may not have noticed—minor, perhaps, but important to “serious buyers.” You are reminded that rarity does not guarantee liquidity, and that other valuables like yours are quietly circulating. The message is…

During my recent trip through Fortaleza, Recife, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Porto Alegre, I was struck by the permanence of the informal settlements I saw. In Rio, favelas — sprawling, self-built communities — have existed for generations. Some, like Morro da Providência, trace roots to the late 19th century. Today Brazil’s national statistics institute estimates that nearly 16 million people live in favelas and similar urban communities across the country — about 8 % of the national population of 240 million people. These are not transient summer encampments; they are enduring, multi-generational neighbourhoods with their own economies and social fabrics. By contrast, when unhoused people in Canada and the United States build encampments under bridges or in parks, the state almost always responds with eviction and clearance.…