How COVID-19 Could Bring Needed Change: A Conversation with Andrew MacLeod

Tyee readers know Andrew MacLeod. He’s been our legislative bureau chief since 2007, writing thousands of stories on policy and politics in the province.

But MacLeod kicked off The Tyee’s latest Three Things video interview with a surprise, serenading viewers on the Scottish small pipes before launching into a complex discussion around health and income inequality.

He’s been playing the pipes for almost 15 years, but said he’s still learning.

“I’m an amateur,” he said. “My kids still complain.”

Emma Cooper, The Tyee’s outreach manager, and MacLeod explored many of the issues he’s been reporting on for a decade — employment insurance, the social safety net and the social determinants of health.

In October, MacLeod wrote yet another article highlighting problems with the current employment insurance system — problems that have existed since a major overhaul in the ’90s.

“The result was a system that was sort of far short of its original vision,” he said.

Before the changes, MacLeod noted, 80 per cent of people who lost their jobs received benefits. Afterward, only 40 per cent remained eligible.

It’s important to highlight the problems, he said, especially as we head into a pandemic-driven economic crisis.

“There are a lot of people who would have no way to have an income as big parts of the economy shut down,” he said.

The federal government introduced CERB benefits to help people who lost work, MacLeod acknowledged.

But what was really needed was a better system “that was going to work in good times and in bad.”

“If we’d been looking at this earlier, or at least paying attention to it or making those changes, having that discussion, we could have been entering the pandemic [at] a much better place,” he told viewers.

MacLeod said he hoped the pandemic would bring serious discussion of a universal basic income. The issues of poverty and inequality were clear long before COVID-19, he noted, but largely ignored.

“It is a matter of who it hits, who it touches, who we feel sorry for, who we see as deserving poor, who we see as undeserving poor,” he said.

MacLeod’s most recent book, All Together Healthy, looks at the social determinants of health and how our discussion of health generally misses the mark.

“When we start talking about health in the political realm, everyone thinks hospitals, doctors, nurses, drugs, and we forget that the main things that affect how healthy we're going to be are all the things outside of the health-care system,” he said. “I think even the Canadian Medical Association says that something like 25 per cent of how healthy you are is due to the health-care system, the other 25 per cent is your genetics and another 50 per cent is everything else.”

MacLeod says the book was meant to shed light on the fact that health is generally determined by factors like income, gender and race, not access to care.

Yet a huge amount of money is spent on the health-care system, rather than fixing the conditions that result in poor health.

“We spend relatively little on child poverty, which I should say is huge,” he said.

“Not only are people at lower incomes more likely to get sick, they’re more likely to have worse outcomes when they do get sick, and access to health care at that point would be a piece of it as well.”

MacLeod said he became interested in welfare reform at a young age, when he was walking the streets of Toronto with his dad in the ’70s and saw someone begging for change. His father told him he didn’t need to worry, because in Canada “we look after people.”

“Through becoming a journalist and everything, I spent a lot of time sort of trying to test that out a bit," he said. "To what degree do we look after people?”

MacLeod said he’s optimistic that COVID-19 could bring about important conversations that lead to change.

“We are at a point where something interesting could happen.”

MacLeod said he’s a journalist, not an advocate. But reporting provides information that people can use to push for change.

“If we build support for these things, it puts the politicians in a position where they do need to respond.”