…a new book published Tuesday by the Calgary-based Haultain Research Institute — an updated version of “Canada’s Covid: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic” published last year. Written by Barry Cooper and Marco Navarro-Genie, it delves deep into the policy machinery that gave rise to the massive Canadian and global response to the COVID-19 virus.

Cooper and Navarro-Genie cover the science, politics and economics of the lockdowns, but they also spend many pages tying the lockdowns to authoritarian impulses to use fear to trigger interventions, an argument supported in part by references to a long line of philosophers, including Hanna Arendt, the 20th century political writer whose most famous book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, deals with the use of “fear” to drive expanded government roles in society.