His True Colours

No matter what Doug Ford says, if you listen carefully, you can hear his true colours. Bruce Arthur writes:

It’s hard to imagine how many more ways Ontario can say it. The provincial government encourages you to get vaccinated. You should really do it. It’s individually beneficial, societally beneficial, and there is very little evidence of risk. Vaccines are an incredible thing.

But are they going to force a choice on that? No, they are not. Are they going to try? Not much. Are they going to give up and let the health system deal with a bigger unvaccinated population than Ontario should have had? That’s the plan, apparently. Let the virus take its course.

It amounts to a lean towards the minority of Ontarians who are unvaccinated, rather than siding with the vast majority who are. In the past week, it has become clear.

We have vaccine passports. But Ford has already given a date for when they will no longer be necessary:

Minister of Health Christine Elliott admitted that an expiration date for the COVID-19 vaccine passport system was indeed an issue that could undermine vaccination, but she said they couldn’t move anti-vaxxers anyway. Education Minister Stephen Lecce defended no province-wide education mandate by saying up to 50,000 education staff could be fired under such a mandate, without explaining how many of those staff were in which category, and how many had had first shots. Does he really think all 50,000 are unvaccinated?

Those policies flies in the face of the scientific advice Ford has received:

Despite approval from the province’s volunteer independent science table, the province’s council of medical officers of health, and as of Tuesday 120 of the 141 hospitals in the province, including the biggest ones, the province is still dragging its heels on mandatory vaccinations in health care. Sources indicate the successful provincial mandate for long-term care was pushed hard by Minister for Long-Term Care Rod Phillips. Apparently, health care hasn’t received the same push, or the same reception.

Proof yet again that Conservative governments across the country are intellectually and morally bankrupt when it comes to the policies we need in these difficult times.

Image: The Toronto Star

Ford's Folly

Yesterday, Ontario's education minister announced that all schools in the province are returning to online learning. Bruce Arthur writes:

The schools … well, it’s really something when the province insists schools are safe, refuses to properly test, keeps kids home after Christmas, moves March break, calls on the federal government to somehow procure vaccines for children, won’t cancel classes before April break, insists schools will reopen after April break, and then shuts schools the next day. So we get the blunt-force application of closures across the province, because there is simply too much virus in the community. Well, how did that happen?

As our knowledge of this virus grows, we need to make changes. But the changes in Ontario have been an exercise in whiplash:

“The government is playing chicken, and I think they’ve actually lost,” says Dr. Andrew Morris, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Toronto, and the medical director of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program at Sinai-University Health Network.

“I think they thought that they could time things, regardless of their cynicism of how many people get sick. We’re going to be leading CNN and the BBC in the next couple of weeks. Who would have thought that a year later we wouldn’t have learned from other jurisdictions? But here we are.”

It’s not like the changes are perfect. Ontario needed restrictions, but it needed them Feb. 11, and even the current versions probably aren’t enough to actually reduce cases. A redeployment of vaccines by the risk profile of postal codes is a great idea, and necessary, though the CBC’s Mike Crawley exposed that five of the 114 vaccination hot spots were in fact less COVID-heavy than the provincial average, and that four were held by Progressive Conservative MPPs; meanwhile, seven ridings with much higher rates that were not designated as hot spots were all held by opposing parties.

In the end, it's clear that Mr. Ford can't handle a crisis:

He is in over his head, and it is the weakness that will linger. This failure has plenty of parents in his government, and the incompetence has been exposed in increasingly ruthless fashion, day by day. Sunday, the minister of education wrote a letter saying schools would stay open after the April break; Monday, the premier declared they would be closed. It’s a pattern. On April 1 the government announced restrictions, and changed them five days later as the baked-in numbers kept rising. The vaccination plan was described in great detail on Tuesday last week. Wednesday, it was completely different.

History will remember Doug Ford for his inability to handle COVID.

Image: London Free Press