Tales from the Tour part two
Hello subscribers. As always, thank you for your added support for my work. The funds coming in have allowed me to someone on to help with social media and other behind-the-scenes work so that A Larger Scale reach a wider audience.
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Order at http://www.ubcpress.ca/a-healthy-future.
The fall book tour for A Healthy Future is wrapping up, with the last event on November 23rd at McNally Robinson in Saskatoon. I’ll now switch my attention from promo to prep as Mahli, Abe, Gus and I get ready for the next adventure. We leave at the beginning of December to spend six months in the small mountain kingdom of Lesotho in Southern Africa. Mahjli and I will be working at the Botšabelo MDR-TB Hospital run by Partners in Health in the capital city, Maseru.
I’ll write more about that plan and experience in upcoming posts, but for today wanted to share a wrap-up post on the book tour. Reconnecting with readers and leaders in health and politics has been extremely rewarding and I’m looking forward to hearing more as people make their way through the book.
The latest event was in Vancouver where I was joined by Globe and Mail health columnist and author of Neglected No more, André Picard. Thanks to Noah Berson for the photo- and videography.
And here’s my conversation with Dr. Danyaal Raza in Ottawa, with thanks to host Josh Bizjak at the Douglas Coldwell Layton Foundation.
I was also grateful to have some media interest in the book, including an hour-long phone-in show with CBC Saskatchewan and a podcast for the Hill Times. Links to these and other stories are below. First, as it lives behind a paywall on the G&M site, here’s my full interview with Ian Bailey for the Globe and Mail’s Politics newsletter.
NEWSLETTER BOOKS - A Healthy Future: Lessons from the Frontlines of a Crisis by Ryan Meili. (UBC Press, Purich Books.)
Ryan Meili lived through the pandemic with roles and responsibilities as a father, husband, son, physician and leader of the Saskatchewan NDP.
His varied perspectives have informed his new memoir, A Healthy Future: Lessons from the Frontlines of a Crisis, which tells his own pandemic story, the stories of those he encountered, and also questions how the Saskatchewan Party government managed the pandemic. (The office of Premier Scott Moe did not respond to a Politics Newsletter request for comment on the book.)
Meili, who led the Saskatchewan NDP from 2018 until 2022, now works as a physician in the West Side Community Clinic in inner-city Saskatoon, and also with Tuberculosis Prevention and Control Saskatchewan, delivering clinical care in remote Northern communities affected by TB outbreaks. He responded by e-mail to Politics Newsletter questions:
What made you decide to write the book? What did you think you had to add to the writing that has been done about the pandemic?
COVID didn’t create the problems in health care, in education, in long-term care or poverty. It revealed and worsened the cracks that were already there. During the peak of the pandemic, I served as leader of the opposition in Saskatchewan. I also renewed my medical licence and worked on the COVID inpatient ward, at assessment and vaccine centres, and did weekly clinics at Saskatoon’s largest homeless shelter. This gave me a unique view of the medical, social and psychological impact of COVID, and allowed me to enter into the lives of people who were willing to share their stories of illness, grief and hope. To honour these stories and the stories of all those who haven’t been heard, I wrote this book to help us learn the lessons of what we’ve all been through.
What can you tell us about the process of writing the book?
I first started writing A Healthy Future in spring of 2021, envisioning it as a lead-up to the next provincial election. When I chose to leave politics, the book broadened to a wider view and reflection on the pandemic experience and the lessons it offers us.
Scribbled notes, news stories, interviews and a timeline of key events helped me to reconstruct the experience of each wave. This turned out to be an incredibly therapeutic experience, helping me to process this challenging time and move on in a real way. My hope is that this book will help others to process their experience, providing some closure and hope for change.
You make the case, at the end of the book, for an examination of Canada’s national response to the pandemic. How would you describe the odds now of such a review? What do you think we are missing without such a review?
We are now nearly four years and 54,000 confirmed deaths from COVID in Canada, every Canadian’s life was disrupted, and we seem to be acting as though it never happened. In some ways, that’s understandable. It has been a challenging, painful and divisive time. Maybe we needed to let it sit for a while, needed some time to recover. Now, more than enough time has passed, people deserve answers.
We need to have the courage to shine a light on what went well, what went badly, and commit to learning from our success and our mistakes. And we need to do so before the memories are too distant.
You are tough on the Saskatchewan Party government’s management of the pandemic. How do you respond to critics who may say you are settling political scores in your book?
It’s easy to discount my reporting and opinion as coming from a political opponent of the government, and I’m sure many will. The truth is, the Sask Party didn’t get everything wrong. In particular, they presided over some early success on COVID. Unfortunately, they then chose to ignore the evidence and advice of public health experts in favour of populist rhetoric and misinformation. The results were atrocious and to pretend otherwise would be dishonest. The numbers, and the stories in this book of the people who lost lives and loved ones, tell that tale in living colour.
You acknowledge you were treated for depression near the end of your political career. Are there any lessons from your own experiences you would cite for those now in politics and facing relevant challenges?
The stress of the pandemic affected everyone’s mental health and I’m no exception. Still today, conversations about mental health remain hidden by shame and judgment. I feel it’s important to be honest and vulnerable about the struggles I went through, both to encourage others to know they aren’t alone and that it’s ok to seek help and ok to make a change if they need to.
As well, we need to ask ourselves as a society, how do we want to treat people who run for office? We won’t find flawless people. There aren’t any. But if everything in politics is about shame and judgment, we will be left to be led by only the shameless.
More interviews here:
The Hot Room - Hill Times Podcast
As always, thanks for the support, and please let me know if there are topics you’d like to see me cover in the posts ahead.
One of the problems I see, and have experienced personally, is the lack of communication within the health care system. One of my experiences involved having doctors at two different clinics, one my GP and the other a gynaecologist. Both were dealing with my issue ( an ovarian cyst) but communication between them was lacking. It seems to me that our system would really benefit from another level of care which would include patient advocacy.
Revealing the shortcomings in health and education policies are an important part of public engagement. The hardest part is taking those learnings and creating empirical research that is solution based. Ideology often stands in the way of accepting possible solutions and we continue to allow policies that damage the very people politicians are elected to serve. You have always been a clear beacon of servant leadership.