In June 2024, a major water main ruptured in Calgary, and some residents refused to believe it was happening. Jennifer Irish, a principal at Pendulum Geopolitical Advisory, founding director of the University of Ottawa's Information Integrity Lab, and a former Canadian diplomat and national security executive, points to it as a sign of something larger. When people can no longer tell what is fact from what is not, she argues, they lose the ability to make informed decisions about their communities, their democracy, and their own health.

The conversation covers what Irish calls an age of industrialized amplification and distortion of narratives, in which hostile state actors work to sow discord and erode public trust. That erosion is the real damage. These campaigns take hold because of a distrust in government that already exists, and rather than merely exploit it, they deepen it, to the point that a public inquiry has named disinformation an existential threat to democracy.

When someone rejects the evidence, the instinct is to hit back with better facts. Dr. Kumanan Wilson, a general internal medicine specialist who has spent two decades studying vaccine hesitancy, says that move can backfire. He recalls trying to change naturopathic students' minds with hard data and a polio survivor's story, and watching the room turn more anti-vaccine. When a belief is tied to identity, arguing against it makes people dig in their heels, and they can reject the messenger, as well as the message.

The conversation makes the case that the way through is empathy and meeting people where they are, the approach that reached vaccine-hesitant communities and the convoy protesters he visited. It closes on an example that challenges what ‘misinformation’ is. During COVID, the people who doubted vaccines would halt transmission were dismissed as misinformed, but given the speed with which variants emerged, in some ways they were right. When defined carefully in terms of best evidence at the time, what counts as ‘misinformation’ can change; and that idea requires careful and empathetic communication.

AI in healthcare is often talked about as something magical. Dr. Douglas Manuel, a family and public health physician, senior scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, and organizer of Ottawa's recent symposium on AI in health research, pushes back on that. AI is a tool, he argues, an instrument like the thermometer or the blood pressure cuff. A revolution, yes, but medicine has been absorbing new instruments for two thousand years, and like all of them, this one has to be calibrated.

The conversation covers why AI scribes have been adopted faster than anything Manuel has seen in 35 years of medicine, why the messy data underneath the algorithms is the real bottleneck, and what leaders should watch for when choosing between AI products. He also draws on his pandemic experience as one of Ottawa's most visible medical voices, and lands on the warning easiest to overlook in the rush to adopt: almost every new technology widens inequities before it narrows them, and the question is never just whether a tool works, but who it works for.

Misinformation actors have a favourite move: point to scientists who changed their recommendations and say, see, you can't trust the experts. Jeremy Grimshaw, one of the world's leading authorities on evidence synthesis, has a systematic answer to that. He also reflects on a charged public forum in Alberta where he faced a room of organized COVID skeptics, and explains the approach that actually worked.

The conversation makes the case that the most powerful thing leaders and communicators can do is help their audiences understand how science actually develops over time. Changing recommendations are not a sign that experts can't be trusted. They are a sign that the scientific process is working exactly as it should.

Silence is one misinformation strategy — it's just the wrong one. And when organizations do speak up, they often make the same mistake: assuming that better information changes minds. Dr. Ami Palmer, clinical ethicist and health misinformation researcher at MD Anderson Cancer Centre, has a more useful framework, and it starts with showing up in the information environments where your audience actually forms its beliefs.

The conversation covers why frequency matters as much as accuracy, why organizations need to be present in the spaces where misinformation is already circulating, and why targeting the extremists is a waste of resources. The people worth reaching are the ones in the middle, still open to evidence, who just need a clear, respectful, data-backed counter to the talking points they are already hearing. Palmer also explains why changing someone's mind is rarely about giving them better information.  And what organizations need to understand about how beliefs are actually formed.

Ottawa's Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Trevor Arnason, joins Jamie and Justin to reflect on what five years of COVID has taught public health units about misinformation. He shares how Ottawa Public Health responded in real time to a false claim about a child's death at CHEO, why the legacy of COVID has made vaccine hesitancy harder to address, and why his team now treats misinformation as a public health issue in its own right rather than a problem tied to any single virus or vaccine.

The conversation covers what actually worked during the pandemic: building a trusted social media presence, the underappreciated role of timeliness in countering false claims, and the growing importance of community engagement with populations that don't show up in surveys or on social media. 

Book recommendation:
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari