Disrupting Inevitability For Good

October is my favourite month - the weather, the leaves, travel for conferences, cozy sweaters, my daughters’ birthday, Thanksgiving turkey dinner, what’s not to love? 

However, I’ve been feeling a tension between being in my favourite month, and the harmful/ideologically-fuelled policies popping up: 

• I’m sipping my hot chocolate and reading my mayor’s op-ed reframing our homelessness issue as a park safety issue. 
• I’m admiring the fall leaves on my walk while listening to a podcast about the US election shenanigans.
• I’m enjoying dinner in Old Montreal with a colleague, where we discuss how the government bundled mental health and addictions together with homelessness and we thought it was just for convenience and maybe we’d get a bit more funding to work with, but now we see that by conflating mental health, addictions, and homelessness as one problem, they have paved the way for solutions like involuntary addictions treatment to disappear homeless people instead of, you know, building housing.

And as I have turned my attention to Canadian federal politics and the polls more this fall too, things getting worse feels…inevitable.

But our job is to disrupt that inevitability. For good. So I’m sharing three unrelated things that are keeping me hopeful and motivated right now.

1. The New Brunswick Election 
On October 21, I was meeting with my entire Action Hepatitis Canada Steering Committee in Montreal. We were doing our strategic planning for 2025-2030 and starting to sketch out our work plan for the coming year. These caring and brilliant leaders are from across the country, and their hearts were heavy as they recounted how things are going in their provinces: harm reduction cuts, returns to 1-for-1 needle exchanges, cruelty against people who are living in encampments, the tabling of involuntary treatment legislation. A rise in social conservatism is bad news for people who care about health equity and social justice. There was a cloud over the room as we discussed next steps. 

And then. 

During dinner, the NB election results started coming in. Blaine Higgs, premier since 2018, is a social conservative who instigated what became a national conversation about pronouns and gender identity and “parental rights” in schools two summers ago with his controversial Policy 713. He showed disdain for evidence-based policies, commenting “data my ass” on camera regarding statements from his Deputy Minister of Education. He weakened bilingual policies and discouraged government employees from offering land acknowledgements, while also lowering taxes for the highest income earners in the province. 

And two weeks ago, on election day, New Brunswick resoundingly said no thank you, that’s enough of that. Thirty-six minutes into vote counting, a victory was called for Liberal party, and Premier Higgs would go on to lose his own seat.

“We know that no one wins by punching down – and New Brunswickers showed Canada that this brand of negative conservative politics is not welcome here,” said Unifor National President Lana Payne in a statement.

The inevitability of the conservative wave across the country was disrupted in tiny little New Brunswick. We cheered at the dinner table and went into day 2 of our meetings feeling like progress was possible.  

2. Staying IRL
From Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman:

As you surface from an hour inadvertently frittered away on Facebook, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the damage, in terms of wasted time, was limited to that single misspent hour. But you’d be wrong. Because the attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling—instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful—it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are, and thousands of other things—and all these distorted judgments then influence how we allocate our offline time as well. If social media convinces you, for example, that violent crime is a far bigger problem in your city than it really is, you might find yourself walking the streets with unwarranted fear, staying home instead of venturing out, and avoiding interactions with strangers—and voting for a demagogue with a tough-on-crime platform. If all you ever see of your ideological opponents online is their very worst behaviour, you’re liable to assume that even family members who differ from you politically must be similarly, irredeemably bad, making relationships with them hard to maintain. So it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change you we’re defining “important matters” in the first place.

I find it easier to remain positive and hold an outlook that people are generally good when I spend my time offline.

3. “We are world builders”
I’m reading Let This Radicalize You by organizers Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba. In the introduction, I have underlined these snippets: 

“We are world builders.” 

“Reality is malleable.”

“It’s important to both ground ourselves in the here and now and also remember that the world is much bigger than this moment, bigger than us and our experience of it, and much bigger than we imagine when we are afraid.”

“Possibility is…stronger than assumption or reaction because it is intentional. It is an awareness that cannot be snatched away.”

We are WORLD BUILDERS, you guys. Nothing is inevitable. Let’s gooooo.

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