COVID-19, Hygiene Theatre, Masks, and Lockdowns: “Solid Science” or Science Veneer? is the latest installment in the Institute’s essay series on the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay examines whether government policy responses followed the science and evidence extant at the time of COVID’s emergence and progression through the population, or whether governments followed the science selectively to create more of a veneer of science than a solid policy foundation.
On COVID, We Fought the Last War. And Lost is the latest installment in the Institute’s series on the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay, by Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, documents how much of the government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were inspired by practices used to combat the HIV pandemic decades earlier. But because the two viruses are so different, these HIV-inspired policies were entirely unsuited to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Consequences of Electoral Reform in British Columbia finds that changing the province’s voting system to a form of proportional representation, or PR, would lead to bigger costlier provincial governments. In fact, governments elected under PR systems are nearly 30 per cent bigger than governments elected under first-past-the-post, based on election data from 26 countries between 2004 and 2015 (the most recent year of comparable data).
The Impact of Proportional Representation on British Columbia’s Legislature and Voters finds that changing British Columbia’s voting system to a form of proportional representation would give rise to smaller, single-issue parties, lead to more coalition governments and increase uncertainty in Victoria, based on an analysis of election data from 30 countries between 2000 and 2017.
