Webi­nar on civ­il security

On Feb­ru­ary 10, 2021, Joris Arnaud, a researcher with Cité-ID, joined Irène Clouti­er from the City of Mon­tréal​’s Office of Eco­log­i­cal Tran­si­tion and Resilience, and Valérie Lemieux of the Mon­tréal Region­al Pub­lic Health Direc­torate, to offer an ini­tial webi­nar on civ­il secu­ri­ty in a series orga­nized by Quebec’s Min­istry of Pub­lic Secu­ri­ty. The webi­nar explored chal­lenges relat­ed to Montréal’s recov­ery fol­low­ing the Covid-19 pandemic.

Joris Arnaud took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to present pre­lim­i­nary results from Cité-ID’s research on the links between post-cri­sis recov­ery and Montréal’s social fab­ric. The research, con­duct­ed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the ASCQ and the Min­istry of Pub­lic Secu­ri­ty, looked at how the social ties of Mon­treal­ers influ­ence indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive resilience in the con­text of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. Fol­low­ing an approach sim­i­lar to research in Boston and New York City, Cité-ID’s team con­duct­ed a sur­vey with res­i­dents of six Mon­tréal bor­oughs to find out about their social con­nec­tions in the con­text of the ongo­ing pan­dem­ic. The results show, notably, an increased mis­trust of strangers, but con­fi­dence in pub­lic health directives.

The study was based on the con­cept of build back bet­ter adopt­ed by the Unit­ed Nations, along with the Sendai Frame­work for Dis­as­ter Risk Relief 2015 – 2030. These approach­es sug­gest that post-COVID recov­ery must take social and envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors into account to stim­u­late the revi­tal­iza­tion of indi­vid­u­als and communities.