The project was ambitious: to measure the evolution of Canadian society since the 1970s by exploring themes such as the family, education, health and consumption. mirror, mirrorby director Simon Madore and journalist Frédéric Choinière, suggests a host of avenues for thinking about the society in which we want to live for the next 50 years.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
Constraint is sometimes a tool. mirror, mirror, which will be broadcast on Saturday as part of Doc Humanité on ICI Télé (and which can already be found on ICI Tou.tv), was shot while our daily interactions were still limited by health measures. It bursts the screen: rather than showing, the documentary by Simon Madore and Frédéric Choinière gives us to hear. There are only “talking heads” or almost on the screen.
“It’s a bit of a Zoom luxury that we have made”, agrees the journalist. Here, it serves the purpose well. Both the journalist and the contributors who dissect the evolution of our health systems, accessibility to education or even our relationships with consumption and the family speak directly to the camera. The approach underlines the mirror effect implied by the title: we are invited to look ourselves in the face, to see the good and the less good sides of our society.
The idea, says the journalist, was to start from everyday life to explore different social issues. How many Canadians got up every morning in 1970 and how many are there today? How do we get to school and work? How do we live as a family, in what kinds of homes? What do we have to learn from the major differences between 1970 and the 2020s?
Live beyond its means
What emerges, according to Frédéric Choinière, is first of all the idea that we live beyond our means. “This notion of indebtedness applies to various sub-topics covered in the documentary,” he points out.
Our way of living in 2022 and occupying the territory has an impact both on natural resources and on our public and personal finances.
Life in Canada has changed a great deal, of course, over the past half century. Equality has not yet been achieved, but the place of women in society has “changed a lot”, as several speakers point out. The economic situation of seniors has also greatly improved, both because of savings strategies (RRSPs, for example) and the establishment of a safety net that did not exist before. And if access to education has improved a lot, there are places where we may have missed the boat…
PHOTO PROVIDED BY ICI TÉLÉ
Frédéric Choinière, journalist
“We did not see how the impact of the car was going to be overwhelming in our lives, in our way of developing the territory, in our social decisions, and how difficult it is to unravel that today”, observes the journalist. mirror, mirror gives an eloquent example: in 50 years, the city of Winnipeg has lost 30% of its inhabitants, but the size of this agglomeration has grown by 300%. A strong symbol at a time when we are talking about densification.
This figure hides a complex reality, that is to say the cost of road construction and maintenance, greenhouse gas emissions, the structure of daily life, the encroachment on agricultural land and this which, according to one of the participants, is one of the number one public enemy for our health: a sedentary lifestyle. An immobility accentuated by the use we make of our screens…
facts and ideas
mirror, mirror rakes wide and digs intelligently to identify the transformations that it would perhaps be desirable to operate over the next 50 years to improve things in the “best country in the world”. And this, without ever relying on a moral posture: Simon Madore and Frédéric Choinière start with facts and figures, their guests draw conclusions and it is up to the viewer to make up his mind.
The findings are sometimes harsh — “Physical activity policies fail,” says Ahmed Jérôme Romain, of the University of Montreal — but the tone is never catastrophic. mirror, mirror highlights the challenges facing us in terms of diversity, the aging of the population, the place of Aboriginal peoples or the environment, but in a pragmatic and stimulating way. Enough to stimulate discussions and, perhaps, concrete actions.
Saturday at 10:30 p.m. on ICI Télé and ICI Tou.tv now