Mr. Chair, thank you for the invitation to talk to you about this very important subject we are looking at today.
From what I understand, you have already heard from many experts and representatives of UN organizations, as well as international and Canadian civil society organizations about the human impact of COVID-19 in fragile and conflict-affected countries. The human toll of this pandemic is significant and heart-wrenching, and as you have heard over the last few sessions some groups have paid a heavier price than others.
Today I would like to talk to you about a subject related to the COVID-19 pandemic that has not received much attention.
COVID-19 has tested the capacity of every country and every government in the world, including Canada. Studies have shown that the quicker a government reacts in implementing appropriate measures, the lesser the impact of COVID-19 is on the country or the areas that are controlled by the government. What most of these studies assume is the capacity of the state to do so. More crucially, though, what they take for granted is that the government and the state institutions themselves have the legitimacy in the eyes of their population to do what is necessary to control the pandemic.
Based on significant research that I and others have done related to legitimacy in fragile and conflict-affected countries, we now know that while people value democratic norms, systems and structures, the ones who are finding it hard to survive and who are facing a bleak future tend to care more about their survival and their immediate needs, at least in the short-term. The entity that tends to respond to their plight and that people perceive to have a visible impact on their daily lives earns legitimacy, or what we call performance legitimacy.
As a person who was born in—