Thank you very much for the question. It's a big one and, of course, there is no easy answer.
Overall, I think we have had a challenge over the past couple of years with the pandemic, in which science was very much at the forefront and in the press every day. A lot of scientists in the press were much more visible, and sometimes there is a contrary type of argument. Of course, we knew nothing at the beginning about that virus, the behaviour of the virus and how to develop vaccine drugs that would diminish the effect of the pandemic, so there was a back and forth with little information. Maybe the general public started to say, “What is that?”
I think that what we have to do now and do much better at the level of the federal government, for example, is first of all for the tri-council to support research and explanations of the scientific methods, so basically to have citizens involved in research projects, what we often call “citizen science” or “participatory science”. For me, it's not the result of today that's important; it's more the process of science so that everyone understands a bit more how you build science one little piece at a time. I think that's critical.
Another critical aspect—working very closely with the province—is education. General education is key, but so is education in science from primary school. You start simple, but the principle of science is that kids enter science as a young generation. They are bright. They are very curious. I think we need to make sure that we foster that more and more in the future, with a very strong collaboration between the federal government, provincial governments and cities, to make sure that you put science there, that you explain science to kids and explain science to citizens.
In addition to that, and given what happened for example in Ottawa over the past few weeks, is that we need to have social scientists on board—I think Gail mentioned that—to be able to understand a little bit of how society, how our democracy, evolved with time, because there is some danger. I have been a bit anxious about this for the past couple of years now. We see that social media goes so quickly and that you can rally people from all over the world on a very bad piece of information. I think we have to make sure that social scientists are at the table with, for example, experts in public health and virology if we're talking about pandemics, but also experts in climate change. How do we make sure that we can explain to our citizens that climate change is very important? What does it mean for me on my street and my family?
Otherwise, it's too abstract, so we have to change the way we do it as scientists.