COVID-19 and returning to "normal"

Welcome to the Rule of Law Matters podcast. If you're wondering what the Rule of Law means and why it matters, this is the podcast for you. This is season one, episode 11, COVID 19 and Returning to “Normal.” This podcast is brought to you by the Law Society of British Columbia. The Law Society is a regulatory body that protects the public by setting and enforcing professional standards for lawyers in our province. We bring you this discussion today to raise awareness about the importance of upholding the rule of law. Here's your host.           

Jon Festinger

I'm your host Jon Festinger. I'm a member of the Law Society's Rule of Law and Lawyer Independence Advisory Committee. I'm also a lawyer and teach at UBC's Allard School of Law and the Thompson Rivers University Faculty of Law. Today, we welcome Micheal Vonn, chief executive officer of PHS Community Services Society. PHS provides housing, healthcare, harm reduction and health promotion for some of the most vulnerable and underserved people in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and Victoria. Prior to that, she served as policy director of the BC Civil Liberties Association for more than 15 years. Welcome Micheal.

Micheal Vonn

Oh hello, nice to be here.

Jon Festinger

Well, tell us a bit about yourself, why did you chose to become a lawyer as your career path and did it have a connection to the rule of law right at the beginning or are those principles you discovered later?

Micheal Vonn

Oh, that's a good question. I think it did have a connection. So I'll tell you I came to my desire to be a lawyer and to participate in law through another pandemic, a pandemic in time, HIV. HIV brought me to the law and I remember exactly where I was at the BC AIDS conference having heard a, a lecture, a seminar on the Cuerrier case, which is about the criminalization of non-disclosure of HIV status, and I actually know the spot that I was standing when I realized I'd have to go to law school.

And one of the things about understanding ethical and legal issues around HIV is that I really think it was in some ways the apex of bringing the language of human rights to healthcare and obviously built on all kinds of other movements, gay rights movements, feminist movements, all kinds of things, but you really understood the importance of the law to protecting people's rights in the context of a state of emergency and so that is, that's what brought me in the door and understanding the wonderful world of the Charter and how there's more than one good and how we go about balancing everything that's what's kept me there.

Jon Festinger

I think there are a lot of lawyers who come to the law, no matter what area they end up practicing in, because of what we might call a rule of law principle and I dare say that's a really good thing which sort of takes us to some of the issues that we face in British Columbia and in Canada today and we're going to spend time talking about the effects of the pandemic and rule of law issues, this is sort of the third discussion on this topic that we've had, coming from different angles. But I want to start maybe at a 20,000 foot level where in a free and democratic society, civil liberties have been suspended in some way, in any way at all, whether justified or not, and the underlying cause goes away as it looks like the pandemic will eventually go away no matter what timeframe you associate with it; how fast should we expect things to snap back to normal? How fast should we expect that any breaches of the rule of law be made to disappear?

Micheal Vonn

Well, since we're up so high, let me take a very, very high level introduction or entry into that question. I think in terms of what I would call a kind of a social imaginary, right, how do we envision this thing, the concern, and we saw this in the War on Terror very much, is that we land up in a state of exception, we are in some other place where our rules don’t apply and I say some other place as if it's a geographical place, we're in a new world people might say. I think the danger of that is profound. I would prefer, and I think the law, the container of the law says we're in the same place but the context is different and where the context is different how we balance goods and how we do respond proportionately is the same, what we're responding to is extreme but how we go about doing that, the container is the same, we're in the same place but we adjudicate it according to the nature of the response that's required. So the container is the assessment that you do to understand that you are, your actions are prescribed by law and that they are proportionate, right.

So it's, it's essentially, it's the test, are we in the same place or are we in a different place and so the danger is that we not land up at a different place but the factors that we are assessing are different. But again, when I'm, when I use the language of container, I realize it's a, it's a metaphor. Inside of how we make an assessment on this, I think one of the, one of the graver dangers that the notion that the law is going to take some kind of non-incremental growth phase into an illiberal state, is that our kind of cultural norms change so you see function creep, you see definition creep, you see basic notions of what we consider to be harm risk etcetera grow and start to creep out, oh creep out, I just invented that term in that context.

So you see that you know while we may agree that you know security is a good, for example, you start seeing the shift, the culture norms shift where people are expecting different things and we're using language as if we all agree on the terms because they're so well-articulated but the context, the context of what we are adjudicating seems to change. So is my, is my, is my fear a harm as opposed to a demonstrable, a different set of demonstrable harms right? You see this creep, you see this creep everywhere.

Jon Festinger

So Micheal, when we think about applying the rule of law principles to any particular situation, as important as the rule of law is, and it seems very often to suggest to people that it's a series of immutable principles but those principles in fact do change and can change and can, in particular, grow, the real issue is context, the context of society and perception. You know you talked about sort of the aftermath of 9-11 and how society might perceive certain incursions into the rule of law or not, so it becomes terribly important that the courts and commentators are able to parse out what reactions in society are justifiable and important and what reactions are inconsistent with the rule of law. Over to you.

Micheal Vonn

Yeah, that's absolutely it. And again, the, the security situation, the War on Terror situation provides so many examples of this. So you would hear people say, and it was very common in well-meaning people as well, would say well, we've made a lot of changes at the airport so why can't we do it on buses, why can't we do it on ferries, why can't we do it at bars; what seems to be the problem here? People are acclimatized to this and there is a potential benefit so why can't we do it? And so and we have had some apparently permanent changes in how we get on an airplane and we've had some relaxation of those things.

So I think that, I mean outside of the context of very specific examples, it's hard to say where, where the new normal, again the fear of the new normal, becomes something that is actually an unjustifiable incursion on rights as opposed to kind of a sensible evolution in the balancing of those rights. It's like the specifics are critical because without again an appropriate comparator, it is hard to say whether or not we are fundamentally making a shift in the balance of rights or is the shift the context.

Jon Festinger

So let's just zero in on a couple of examples, and obviously there aren't going to be definitive answers on those but this is a different kind of terror that we've been facing in the pandemic, a healthcare emergency around the world which has had impacts in all sorts of countries but including our own and certain, what we would think of as traditional liberties, the ability to go outside without a mask. I mean I would think that you know 10 years ago, even five years ago, if you were wearing a mask at night in Vancouver, people would think you were a criminal potentially. And we know there were, there were vilifications, completely unjustified, of, of our Asian population for wearing masks to prevent other people from getting disease so we had all sorts of biases that have now completely almost reversed themselves.

So let's use masks as an example and let's use you know going into restaurants and having a meal, you know how do you see us defining what's normal in a rule of law sense? You know what definitions should we use when we snap back to let's call it the state of rule of law normal?

Micheal Vonn

Sure. Let me add to the irony there, I, while I was at Civil Liberties, we fought to ensure that it wasn't illegal to wear a mask during a demonstration, I mean there's, there's a fast flip. Masks are interesting in regards to yes what would constitute normal. The danger, I think, is that there are always airborne illnesses, there are always communicable disease, there always have been but outside the context of a pandemic, when you mandate, when you use the coercion of the state to require something, you have to have very compelling justification.

And so I think that again the specificity, and I sometimes remind myself because it's so important, the most critical piece of the requisite humility that we need to address these issues is to be specific. And so around masks, if you do not have a pandemic, regardless of the fact that there is always something, not to mention colds, flus, that things fly out of people's faces, we can't let the fact that once there was utility in an extreme context dictate that some people may choose to. Some people may choose to do this but where we have the state compelling autonomous sovereign individuals to do something, again the threshold for that is high.

Jon Festinger

So I think you know masks are such a fascinating example because when we return to a post-pandemic state, we can see the cultural changes are very likely to include people who are going to want to wear masks in that state and people who absolutely don't want to wear masks in that situation and the rule of law principle that would work would be to accommodate both in terms of freedom and not have state coercion either way. So we might actually get to a better place because a couple of years ago yeah, the Civil Liberties Association had to fight for the right to wear a mask and it's unlikely that that problem will arise again. The issue is the coercion and what the state does and doesn't do.

So on that note, let's talk about another aspect of what the state does and doesn't do. Even though serious side effects from vaccines might be rare they do happen and in Canada the only province with a vaccine injury compensation scheme is Quebec, none of the other provinces has that. Obviously BC doesn't have that. So other than in Quebec, if someone gets injured getting a vaccine, they're on their own and subject to their own insurance. Should the rest of Canada and should BC have a vaccine injury compensation scheme?

Micheal Vonn

Yes, absolutely we should and the federal government has promised us one but it has not yet arrived. I think this is one of the places where Canadians have had a bit of a jolt; we're so used to considering ourselves as ahead of the herd, we're way behind on this, we are the only country in the G7 that does not have a vaccine injury compensation scheme. And the fundamental fairness of this is something that was recognized in Quebec in the 80s, it's been called for for decades but we haven't seen any movement on it until now and of course we don’t know what the Canadian system is going to be, it doesn't yet exist although it's been promised.

Simply put, if you know if you are injured through a vaccination, and this does happen, as rare as we are told, it certainly happens, and you are going to be very challenged and we actually have cases in Canada where individuals tried to sue but you would have to sue for what, negligence, right, where no one was negligent, it was a properly approved and all the things and yet this is something that we know happens in the world. It, this is, this is a drug, things can happen. So we have, we have judges opining in case law saying you know how, how fundamentally unfair it is that there is no remedy for the people, for the claimants in these cases because you really have to go to this other analyses. So Quebec has a tribunal system, administrative systems are I believe the dominant systems throughout the countries of the world that have this. We'll be unsurprised to hear that the US system is a little more like litigation but these systems do exist and they address a need and it's, I don’t think we'd have to sell this to ordinary people as an issue of fundamental fairness. They could appreciate why it is so.

Jon Festinger

Well it also I think has a real psychological impact. If you are in doubt about taking the vaccine, for whatever reason, you don’t have to be a full on anti-vaxxer, you can just be afraid, not having a compensation system makes it that much easier to say I won't get the vaccine so it actually makes very little sense in the present context not to have a compensation system because it might, and hard to know how much, but it certainly, to some extent, would add to someone's reluctance. You know I hate to justify not having the vaccine but I can see that it might be a factor in someone who is vacillating and there's also a fundamental unfairness there, especially if you're telling me the US has such a system and Canada, for the most part, doesn't, that seems shocking at least to me.

Micheal Vonn

Yeah, it is a fundamental fairness issue and I think you're right Jon, I think it would, it would go to some people's decision making. I did have a brief look and apparently the data, and it's very, there's very little, there's very little data on how this manifests in terms of people's decision making, the factor, the absence or the presence of such a compensation scheme. The data is mixed, that's what I do know, so I'm not sure we could sell it on the research that exists but outside of that context, I think that the issue of the fundamental fairness, if someone is civic minded and says I want to do this for you know the whole complex of factors that are involved including some that don't involve myself, that we should socialize the risk of that. And there is, it's small but there exists a risk and we should socialize that risk, absolutely.

Jon Festinger

Well let's take this data question to the next logical place. Some people have taken issue with the government's lack of transparency on COVID 19 data and how much information we do actually have. How do you think the government can do a better job on collecting and reporting of data? What about the role of media and social media in doing that, sometimes leading us to good data, sometimes taking us on wild goose chases?

Micheal Vonn

Oh, it's a super interesting question, right. The government's selection of data to present puts me in mind of the, of the analysis that we would have in a library context. I learned a lot about censorship and about freedom of information in a library context and since you can't have every book on the shelf, the question is are you censoring a book you don't choose or are you just doing selection, you gotta pick something. And you see this in journalistic ethics too, we didn't select this story, does that mean we're censoring it? And you know these are, it's a very complex analysis to decide when you've got a lack of transparency as opposed to the ordinary selection that you, again, you've gotta put forward something, you can't put forward everything.

So I was actually quite sympathetic to some of the public health and government data issues early on and you can see that if you are reporting out on a very, very tiny geographic catchment, you do butt up against privacy issues, you absolutely do. The more things expand out, again, the importance of the context, that the balance of those two goods shifts and it shifts in favor of the disclosure of the data. The government should be disclosing the kind of data that citizens should be able to use in their autonomous assessment to make their own decisions in relation to their health. So I think that context counts but typically outside of those very good justifications of why you would want to be careful about how you disclose that data for individual privacy reasons, we have a public that is hungry, is hungry for this data and so it should be the government's job in relation to the kind of data it is that it should be supplied.

Jon Festinger

Where I think the rubber hit the road to some degree in BC is around this question of neighbourhoods, you know are there certain neighbourhoods in certain areas that have more COVID, more COVID related cases and I think there was some concern that you know that that might relate if that data was given out, might disclose some things that might reinforce stereotypes or create other problems of interpretation and that's why we may not have all of that. At what point do you give out data if it would reinforce or suggest or create prejudices against groups because that seems wrong as well, so how do you, how do you balance those interests?

Micheal Vonn

I think that you balance those interests in the same way that you say that the response to speech is more speech, the response to data that could be potentially prejudicial or stigmatizing is more data. We don’t have people who are particularly quote unquote the vectors of disease or otherwise. The concern about stigma is fair but how we go about addressing it should be to add to something as opposed to subtract from the data. We don’t want to say we're not giving you the data because we don’t trust you to have the correct analysis, we want to make sure that the appropriate lens is on the table as well.

Jon Festinger

When data isn't given then a lot of people read into what isn't given and make things worse than they actually might be if the data was disclosed and people could actually have a discussion and a debate about that data so a lot of really murky ugly things live in the imagination when there isn't actual information. So information is curative and if there is a debate to be had and if somebody wants to say things that are racist or prejudicial then we just have to make sure we have the voices to meet them and have the debate in the public square in a real way because usually the bullies disappear pretty quickly in those circumstances.

Micheal Vonn

Yeah, it's a good view. I mean it speaks to the importance of having a long form. It is absolutely human nature, and when I use the language of vectors of disease, there is no pandemic in the world that has not been blamed on the people over there. This is ordinary, it's the history of our understanding of how we process this and we can understand that that is an ordinary process and we can meet it, we can meet it with more information, we could meet it with nuance, we could meet it by engaging in the conversation so that we don’t again create all of these you know vats of darkness in which all kinds of things can be speculated. You know sunshine really is the curative here.

Jon Festinger

So let's take this maybe to the next level of discussion. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC is now apparently threatening to discipline doctors who spread COVID 19 misinformation; is there space for critique by dissenting doctors and scientists? You know from an academic perspective, there are always dissenting academics and we look at that in the academy as a very good thing so what is the space for dissenting doctors and scientists, how do we balance public health with our right to hear information from all sources about our own health?

Micheal Vonn

This is really an important aspect of what we are challenged with right now. I think that the danger of trying to state against the entire history of the universe of science and ideas and medicine that today's consensus is going to remain tomorrow's consensus is just dire. We rely on the people who think differently, see differently, have data that somehow complexifies our issue to evolve our thinking on anything. We rely on this, the best documents that I know in this, Doris Lessing wrote a book called Prisons We Choose to Live Inside and she doesn't, you know she doesn't, she says look back on history or look back on your personal, your personal life, and just say the thing that you were adamant about that you can't believe you thought at the time, we all have them, right, the thing that we were, and we converted, we converted because even though we may have been part of a consensus and God knows we've gone enough of them in medicine where we go back and say how could anyone have thought that? We think this about politics, how could anybody have thought that, and we always think if I were there I would know that was wrong and we are so full of hooey on that.

Everyone knows about confirmation bias, everyone knows about group think, we are, we rely on people saying something that grates to reassess, evaluate and do the thing we call science, in fact do the thing we call a whole bunch of processes. So it's imperative that we have room for dissent, imperative.

Jon Festinger

Well the history of science, and I don’t pretend to be an expert but I've studied it enough to know and to understand and there've been very many books and articles on the subject, the history of science is the overturning of the previous science and the danger is where cultural norms become the determinant of what the science is. That was the issue with Galileo, he knew that the sun was the center of the solar system but the cultural requirement that that not be true forced him to recant something that he knew was true and that's of course a danger to all of us, that setting back of science set us all back as humans to some degree for some period of time. And that's always the issue. The issue is you know information that isn't freely available, freely transparent so that it can be debated and a better answer can be arrived at because the history of science is in fact that better answer. Every time science thinks it knows something, it discovers more and it discovers inconsistency and what we keep on discovering is that there's more to be discovered.

Micheal Vonn

I think societally we can understand that absolutism is the enemy here. We need to maintain that nuance in order to do that kind of evolving that you said. And I think one of the cultural barriers to that is that we've become very given to a kind of discourse that is anything but humble and is more entertaining because it involves that drop the mic absolutism, I'm throwing it down and you've gotta know that, if you have scientists doing that, they are not good scientists.

Jon Festinger

And I'm going to take this kind of to fundamental rule of law principles; the principle is not freedom of expression as long as you're right or freedom of thought as long as you're right, it's freedom of expression and freedom of thought and the who's right is what gets determined because of the freedom, because of the public square, because of the debate that that creates and the rule of law wants even requires that debate. So if you say to a doctor or a scientist you can't say that, the harm can actually run really deep. You know yes you can think there's a short term benefit but there is a long term loss because there's a loss of trust in the system, there's a loss of trust in the transparency, there's a loss of trust in the debate and that has very scary or it can have very scary consequences.

Micheal Vonn

It does, and could I add to that, we also have a situation right now where many, many people get their information from social media and we have social media companies that have assumed a phenomenal public health expertise by deciding whose opinions, including those of lauded, indeed famous academics and doctors and scientists, don't conform with the current public health information ergo they are putting qualifiers on them. They're, so Facebook and Twitter are dissing some of the best medical thinking in the world to tell people, it's like well this is a consensus thinking ergo you should be warned against it. We've got, we've got a serious, serious problem with the notion of again how we understand how complex this is and who gets to say what it is a legitimate contribution to this discussion.

Jon Festinger

Well and without getting too esoteric, that private companies are determining what the available information should be in an environment where that can't be tested, it's one thing for government as you've pointed out to me, it's one thing for the College of Physicians to issue what is in effect a censorship order that then can be tested in a court, that isn't the way it works in social media because you're dealing with a private entity that is not subject to the Charter unless there's specific governmental rules. Freedom of expression gets suspended in essence by contract if you are a subscriber to social media because that's what you are. So these dangers become magnified and because social media takes so much of the daily discourse in our lives right now, the deficit of that lack of recourse I think is becoming noticeable.

Micheal Vonn

Absolutely and you know the other thing is we're not just having a scientific debate and we're not just having a medical debate. We're talking about a public health issue and in regards to that, I know that again there's been kind of a lot of sloganeering about this, follow the science I keep hearing, well I do follow the science and I can tell you the science is essential but insufficient for all the decisions that are being made. You still have to apply your values to it. The science doesn't tell us whether to close the border, it doesn't, it makes, it gives us some facts to decide that but our values are going to be part of how we determine the response and reasonable people can disagree about those things. And so to, this is not just a debate for experts, it is a debate for the general public.

Jon Festinger

Well let's talk about those values and how they get applied. You know in terms of lockdowns and stay at home orders, they've absolutely been used, and I would suggest successfully, to manage the spread of COVID 19 but they impact different people very differently. While some people like me, for example, can work from home very happily and very easily, many cannot. How do lockdowns impact marginalized groups and how should we look at that issue?

Micheal Vonn

I think there's two different scales that we might talk about. Everything being so complex, of course people have had very different pandemics, very different. As you were pointing out, your pandemic can look very different than the pandemic of the populations that we serve at PHS for example. So the folks that we deal with, the idea of lockdown is already problematic because they may have no place that they call home. That was one of the first challenges that we had in, well people all over the country would have had it but it fell squarely into our purview and public health's purview, how do you ask people to isolate when they have no place to go and how are you going to respond to that? And there's been some public health response and there's been a tremendous charitable sector response to that.

So some of the things that we did, we had essentially COVID hotels, places that people could stay in order to fulfill their isolation if they were waiting on test results or were COVID positive. We also at PHS we have a series of recreational vehicles so that we could actually bring somebody in out of a park if that's where they lived and gave them a space to do that isolation. Again, we think of these things so glibly, you know oh, isolating, isolating where? Not to mention a whole bunch of folks don't have self-contained units so how do you isolate when you share a bathroom and how do you isolate more broadly in the Downtown Eastside where quite frankly the street is the living room, right, even where people have living quarters. And then you think about what do you need to support an isolation if you don’t have family and friends and you have very specific medical needs which could include an addiction. If you are addicted to substance, how are you going to find that substance so that you can successfully isolate? Somebody's got to bring it to you, somebody may have to prescribe it to you so we had, we had pandemic prescribing for people with opioid addictions, right. Opioid use disorder means you can't stay isolated unless somebody can bring you what you need to manage that condition.

And you think about all the ramifications, none of these things are being thought about for the folks for whom their own experience is so different, their own experience, again, there's no delegitimizing their experience but it's a long way from you know here's the latest sour bread recipe, right, to how are you going to be dealing with you know these real life situations and you're going to have to figure something out fast. There has been a radical practicality around how are we going to address these needs because it really has shown us the fault lines between the people who are able to do these things and the people for whom it is not possible without a whole raft of new supports and infrastructure.

Jon Festinger

And consistent with that, we actually see some of the fault lines in the thin theory of the rule of law because the rule of law in its most fundamental state says that the law must apply to everyone equally but if that law which applies to everyone equally ends up favoring certain groups who have resources, then the rule of law in that sort of thin state just reinforces inequality.

Micheal Vonn

Absolutely.

Jon Festinger

And so when we look at the rule of law, you know that suggests that we have to look at it increasingly holistically and when we say the rule of law applies equally, we have to look at equality as including everyone in society, not just looking at it as a very thin principle. And so I suspect that we're seeing those fault lines. We've seen them for years but I think there's indications everywhere around us, including in the United States, including in other parts of the world, where we can't look at the rule of law simply as a golden self-contained principle, or set of principles, as important as they are. We are going to have to contextualize them and look at the actual application of rule of law principles and find increasing levels of equality that the rule of law begets if you will.

Micheal Vonn

Absolutely. And you know to build on that, dealing with the issue of scale is going to be increasingly important in a globalized world so you know how it affects us in different neighbourhoods in Vancouver is profound enough. How it affects us in different parts of the world you know so we think about you know the economic costs of how we have chosen to deal with the pandemic. If we look at this at a larger scale, you know the complexities are just magnified. The United Nations, which is not an entity known for its hyperbole, is talking about you know a recent report is titled Famines of Biblical Proportions. How this affects us as a global community, let alone the fault lines locally, which as I say are stark enough, it's a level of complexity that just speaks to the need to be constantly reassessing what we consider to be equality and how we go about viewing things through that lens.

Jon Festinger

And one of the things that is increasingly becoming clear, and the United States I think is going through it in a very significant way and a very public way right now, and that is that there are rules in certain states and in certain places that allow you to do things that you couldn’t do in other places in the same country. And we have that to some degree in Canada, it's just not as well publicized. There's no doubt things you can do in BC that you can't do in Ontario and things in Ontario that you can't do in BC. How should we look at this issue of resolving inconsistencies and does it lead us, if we question the inconsistencies, to a better place in terms of all of the considerations we've talked about including kind of a more robust series of rule of law implementations?

Micheal Vonn

Yeah, I think a good place to start but not end is to question inconsistencies. It's an ordinary thing that we might see. The question of how is it that I can fly drive to Paris but not drive to Kelowna is a real question, right. I mean that's a fair grounded in my lived reality question that I should be asking. And I say it's the beginning, and it a very fair beginning, but it may not be the end. There may be a justification and so we'll, we require the justification and the justification may shift and it may change. The pandemic may be different here than over there. The vaccination rates may be different here than over here, there's lots of complexities that could be involved in making the distinction but that we should ask for a justification, that's appropriate.

Jon Festinger

Well one thing that inconsistencies very much do is force us to look deeper at the issues and that's what you've done for us today Micheal, you've made us look more deeply at any number of the issues around COVID and we're very, very grateful to you for your time and for all of your thoughts.

Micheal Vonn

Thank you, anytime.

Jon Festinger

Thanks for listening. Micheal shared with us how she views the rule of law in the context of the COVID 19 pandemic. She compared the current situation to the War on Terror and how important it is not to end up in a state of exception where normal rules don't apply. She talked about the law as a container, an assessment of whether governmental actions are indeed prescribed by law. We covered the lack of a vaccine injury compensation program and the need for transparent data. We also talked about how important it is for scientists and doctors to have space to freely debate their ideas so the work of science can fully take place. Lastly, Micheal talked about her work with marginalized groups at PHS Community Services and how COVID restrictions bring further complications to the poor and disenfranchised.

If you want to learn more about the rule of law, visit the Law Society's website at lawsociety.bc.ca. If you liked today's episode, please subscribe and leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. We've also set up an email to receive your feedback. If you have suggestions or comments, send us an email at podcast@lsbc.org. Vinnie Yuen was our terrific producer today. This is your host Jon Festinger signing off.