Macpherson: Horacio Arruda, spin doctor

Horacio Arruda, Quebec’s director of public health, has become a spin doctor — literally.

This week, Le Devoir reported that in late March, the Legault government brought in a political strategist to give Dr. Arruda “strategic communication” coaching for his appearances on the popular Quebec afternoon TV talk show we’ll call The Pigeon Coop.

That’s where Premier François Legault and guests deliver pandemic announcements from the government in a series of monologues to a live studio audience of the reporters Arruda called “my wonderful carrier pigeons” early in the COVID-19 crisis.

The government hired the coach, on a six-month contract for up to $60,000, to teach Arruda how to speak politician. Because that’s what he is now, a politician who hasn’t been elected, lending non-partisan credibility to politicians who have.

The hiring shows the pandemic crisis “is becoming politicized,” a specialist in political communication, Mireille Lalancette, told Le Devoir.

Inevitably, with Arruda’s regular interventions alongside the premier and cabinet ministers, the director of public health has become politicized, too.

In crisis management, added Lalancette, a professor at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, it’s important to “control the message, so it’s consistent and coherent.”

The government has certainly tried to control the message, but the results have been anything but consistent or coherent.

This week, the government found itself with an unusual credibility problem. It wasn’t that too many people didn’t believe one of its messages about the crisis. It was that too many did.

They were teachers over the age of 60. They believed the government when it warned them, for more than a week, that it would be hazardous to their health to go back to the classroom when schools reopened starting next Monday outside metropolitan Montreal.

Even though Quebec has one of the worst records in North America in controlling the coronavirus, our province is the first jurisdiction on the continent to reopen its schools.

That’s so businesses can also reopen early, with the schools serving as daycare for employees’ children too young to be left alone.

Apparently, however, the government forgot Quebec was already facing a teacher shortage, which would become more acute when schools reopened, and classes would be limited for distancing purposes to a maximum of 15 pupils each.

And it neglected to count how many teachers there are over 60. It turned out so many of them intended to heed the government’s advice to work from home that it jeopardized its whole reopening strategy.

So, the government abruptly changed its message to the teachers: suddenly, it would be safe for them to go back to school up to age 70, not 60.

On Wednesday’s Pigeon Coop show, Deputy Premier Geneviève Guilbault, with Arruda beside her, said teachers had somehow been misinformed, and announced a “clarification” by Arruda’s public health administration. “Public health has established the risk factor at 70 years, and not 60 years,” she said.

It wasn’t a “clarification,” though. It was a contradiction of what the government itself had been saying publicly and clearly for more than a week. Only two days earlier, the premier himself had again asked teachers over 60 not to come to school.

And neither the deputy premier nor Arruda explained why it wasn’t until more than a week after the announcement of the school reopening that the health administration “established” the age of risk at 70 instead of 60.

The health director tried to rescue Guilbault, saying the risk increases with age. But that’s not the same as implying, as the deputy premier had, that there’s a risk at 70, but not at 60.

Arruda is beginning to feel the heat, only it’s not from baking his famous Portuguese pasteis de nata custard tarts. On Thursday, he complained about being second-guessed by armchair quarterbacks. The government wasn’t improvising as its critics said, he spun, the situation was “evolving.”

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