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.