Public trust can substitute for coercive pandemic messaging. [causal]
I understood why the campaign was skeptical: Canadian smugness is a powerful drug. Here in British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province, the government had delegated almost all of its crucial Covid communications to Dr. Bonnie Henry, a supremely sensible-seeming public health officer who was a kind of anti-Trump. In a soothing voice just above a whisper, she told us daily about the latest data and entreated us, “Be kind, be calm, be safe.”
XREF: Contrasts with adversarial pandemic politics in the US; connects to broader literature on governmental trust and compliance.
Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 513