Kelsie Senior anticipates the practical and epistemic impact of conservative populism on bioethics in Canada.

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Looking at September 2024 figures from polling firm Abacus Data, the Conservative Party would attract 43% of committed voters compared to the Liberal Party’s 22% share. The party’s current leader has been described as “undoubtedly populist,” offering support for the so-called Freedom Convoy and pledging to “take on state media” by defunding the CBC. Canadians’ trust in government messaging decreased over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the trends that emerged alongside this were increasing numbers of politicians and other public figures openly embracing anti-scientific conspiracy theories and political parties such as the Conservatives incorporating populist themes into both their messaging and their policies, riding a growing wave of populist sentiment emerging in Canada. The rising tide of populism seen in numerous Western democracies including Canada in recent years has the potential to impact bioethics on both practical and epistemic levels, and bioethicists need to be prepared to uphold critical values such as trust in experts, reliability and transparency of evidence, personal autonomy, and social justice.

Politics goes beyond Parliament Hill and legislatures. To quote Benjamin Gregg, “bioethics…” – which so often has a hand in shaping decisions in areas like public health and healthcare administration – “… is politics.” Indeed, some of the work of bioethics has been to determine what role deliberative democracy and public opinion should play in shaping public policy. Particularly when issues close to the heart of bioethics such as the moral obligations of healthcare workers or allocation of healthcare resources are at play, bioethicists have a duty to highlight where relevant laws and other guidelines implemented by government may be at odds with ethical standards and norms.

Photo Credit: Carpetblogger/flickr. Image Description: Faces in a crowd.

Who forms government and the ideals they uphold can unfortunately have very real consequences for bioethicists and the evidence that supports their decision-making. Bioethics and the policy issues it is involved in, such as public health measures, depend on having robust, reliable evidence that is readily available to consult and verify. Government research may drive policies that affect Canadians directly, as it is government agencies that are often responsible for gathering crucial information such as population data needed to determine fair allocation of resources. In the US, the Trump administration was found to have interfered with the 2020 US Census in an attempt to produce results more favourable to the Republican party, which underestimated the number of people belonging to marginalized groups such as Black and Indigenous communities.

Yet far from aiding in the production and sharing of scientific research with the Canadian public whose tax dollars support it, previous Conservative governments in Canada have interfered with the dissemination of research conducted with public funds, and restricted the ability of government scientists to interact with media regarding their findings. In the majority of such cases, scientists who faced being muzzled by government were researching politically sensitive or relevant issues such as climate change.

Populist frameworks often place academics, including bioethicists, among an “elite” who are deemed to be separate from and inattentive to the desires of “the common people” whom populist governments claim to represent. As CTV Chair in Science Broadcast Journalism Kathryn O’Hara explained in a 2010 CBC interview, “Openness is being held ransom to media messages that serve the government’s political agenda.” When scientists are hampered in communicating about their work, the risks of misinterpretation by journalists and loss of public trust in government-funded research only increase. If research relevant to bioethics is hidden for political reasons and standards of transparency are not upheld, the work bioethicists can do and the legislation they can justify based on evidence is negatively affected by the sort of undermined information-environment often created by populist leaders.

The impact of a populist Federal government on bioethics would go beyond bioethicists themselves. These effects would be felt by the patient who cannot review the available evidence in making their healthcare decisions because it has been repressed, and by the clinic that has its funding reduced because it serves a particular vulnerable group and not “the people”. Everyone who is subject to public policies and legislation where expert advice and bioethical concerns such as healthcare equity and justice have been put aside in favour of alignment with political agendas would be affected. For all of those who rely on their work, bioethicists should be ready to defend the rights and liberties necessary for the practice of bioethics from the impacts of rising populism.

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Kelsie Senior is a Master of Health Ethics student at Memorial University. This commentary was originally written in the context of a graduate seminar on health misinformation and lies.