I wasn’t sure if I should share this on the internet.

I’ve been struggling with whether or not to make a public statement about vaccines and where we stand on them.

Neutrality has always been important to us, and continues to be. It’s in our DNA to de-escalate, to problem solve, and to find middle ground and solutions. 

Probably the best thing about growing up as a business in the live event space is that you get an incredible look into the human experience. We build these concerts and festivals that are temporary small towns with infrastructure like bathrooms, police, doctors, bars, restaurants, and clothing vendors. We bring thousands of people together in one place for a short time for a shared experience.

When this entire experience is centred around one unifying draw like a great band or DJ, you attract people of all kinds, and I mean all kinds to one place. What comes with that is the full spectrum of human behaviour. We have been kicked, punched, stabbed with needles, spit on, and called horrible hateful things. We see fights, drug deals, domestic abuse, assault, overdoses, and depression. 

The good thing about all of that, is that it’s in the minority of cases. The small minority.

Usually, we see singing, dancing, laughing, and crying (the good kind). We see marriage proposals, high fives, big smiles, and conga lines. We see friends arm-in-arm, sitting on shoulders, singing their favourite song alongside their favourite band as loud as they can, having the time of their lives. It’s pure, unadulterated, primal joy. When you get the opportunity to be a part of creating those moments, it’s absolutely addictive. It’s what keeps all of us behind the scenes coming back. That moment in the show when we pause in the wing of the stage, looking through the band out at the crowd pulsing with energy is absolutely incredible.

At our company, our skill is balancing the needs and wants of the many vs. the few. It’s why we’re calm, cool, and neutral. It’s why we’re patient and take extra time to listen, even when we don’t want to, or it won’t change our mind. It’s why we’re extremely careful with our words, and our actions, and why we put so much thought into how we approach situations involving people. We certainly don’t want anyone getting hurt, or worse. At the end of the day though, what we do is maintain order and safety, and the tools that allow us to do that are guidelines that enable people to make choices. 

When someone makes the choice to light a cigarette inside of a building, we ask them to put it out. The experts have confirmed that smoking inside of buildings does not give the other occupants of the building the ability to opt-out of inhaling the smoke, and therefore puts their health at risk. Nine times out of ten, they apologize, put it out on the bottom of their shoe, and then awkwardly ask where they should put the butt. Sometimes though, they blow smoke in our face. Usually when this happens, other people around them are really not impressed with this person, especially because it’s a distraction from the show they paid to see. So now we have one individual defying guidelines, impacting many others around them, and being super disrespectful to the people entrusted to keep them safe (us). We now have a few choices to make. We can come in very aggressively with a response team, throw them to the ground, and forcibly remove them from the property. Or, we can do nothing, the cigarette may or may not start a fire, and others may or may not start smoking, creating other fire hazards. Or, and most practically, we can isolate the situation (hey can we chat about this over here where it’s quieter?), empathize with their reason for wanting the cigarette, hear them out, and then explain to them that despite all of those things they still cannot smoke inside. We would then present them with a choice: do not smoke inside and stay and enjoy the show; or do smoke inside, and we’ll have to help you leave for the night. 

Last month, we got an email from one of our NHL clients requesting proof of vaccination for any of our staff working at their facilities. They made the decision as an organization that they would only allow vaccinated individuals into their buildings, including all customers and contractors. So when we started talking about whether or not we would require proof of vaccination as a condition of overall employment in our weekly leadership meeting that followed, we naturally defaulted to listing all of the ways that our software and processes would accommodate different vaccination policies, and allocate staff according to their own vaccination statuses. The answer seemed simple enough, we would create a skill in our scheduling software for “vaccinated” that would allow them to work somewhere, not unlike a requirement to have a certain level of first aid training for a specific site. That was the plan that would keep the most people happy. Perfect... Except that it wasn’t.

Back to the festivals. We build these multi-acre fenced cages and invite tens of thousands of people into them to eat, drink, and be together. Notwithstanding the civil and legal responsibility to keep everyone safe, more importantly we have an ethical responsibility to do so. To keep people safe at live events, we are guided by science. Science is what tells us how many exits we need to safely evacuate everyone in our care. Science helps us interpret the weather and make life-or-death decisions on whether a show should continue, or be cancelled right before the headlining act. Science is what allows us to drive a single 53’ tractor trailer into a grass field, unfold it like a robot, and then suspend 94,000 lbs of equipment over people’s heads without it falling to the ground and killing them. Science allows us to shoot flames and pyrotechnics into the air, without burning anyone. Our entire professional existence is rooted in deep trust for the very smart people that spend their lives studying their respective science to give us the tools we need to provide entertainment for the masses and keep them safe while we do it. 

The problem with our perfect vaccination policy plan, is that it wasn’t the right thing to do. And as soon as we said that out loud, the plan was dead as quickly as it came to life. We knew what we had to do. We didn’t even think twice about it.  We wrote a letter to the entire company explaining that we were choosing to implement a proof of vaccination policy for all staff effective Oct 1, 2021, in solidarity with our entertainment clients who are doing the same. We hit send, and it was official. It was the right thing to do. It was easy.

The hard part was deciding whether or not to tell this story. It’s one thing to implement a policy inside your company, where the only people that would even know about it are the team themselves, and the clients you work with. It’s an entirely different thing to publish it online. The internet is a stormy sea, teeming with hungry sharks, just waiting for someone to slip and fall off the boat. Should we tell the story? Will people just think it’s marketing disguised as a blog post “showing vulnerability”? What if the vocal minority destroys our Google reviews? I have read stories of restaurants begging and pleading for people to stop leaving one-star reviews in protest of their vaccine mandates. That the bad reviews were killing their business in already tough times. Who wants that? Running a local business is hard enough. 

Yet here we are, putting our decision out into the world, permanently.

I didn’t share this thinking that somehow I’d be the one to say the same words differently and all of a sudden convert the unvaccinated-by-choice minority into now trusting the vaccine programs and that our immunization levels would be >90% and we could live happily ever after and stop locking down and finally see Elton John’s farewell tour. No, that’s not realistic. When I was pondering if I should share this story and what my goal was by doing so, I realized that it was another organization sharing their decision publicly that triggered us into action. We followed someone else’s lead, and now maybe someone will follow ours. 

Yesterday I changed the headline on our website to “We believe in doing the right thing”.