Over the years, when people have found out I’m Canadian, I’ve had to field numerous weird questions: Do you ever get summer? (Yes) Was Celine Dion’s Wedding the top rated television program in Canadian history? (Also Yes) Do you eat Loons? (For the record: we don’t, generally speaking!) But lately, I’ve been consistently getting only one question: What the fuck is going on up in Canada with Covid?
The answer to that starts in some ways in the late 1980s when Brian Mulroney (yes, he IS related to Dermot) discontinued our domestic vaccine production, and no government since reinstated it. Keep that in mind for later.
In other ways, the story starts in 2017, when Doug Ford decided to run for Mayor of Toronto after years of being in his brother (famous crack smoker and Jimmy Kimmel interviewee Rob Ford)’s shadow. He actually said “this one’s for you, Robbie!” in an attempt to trade public sympathy for Rob’s death into a bonanza at the ballot box. (By all accounts, the brothers’ relationship was strained at best, which was evidenced recently when it came to light Doug was accused of embezzling his brother’s estate, essentially taking the money from Rob’s widow and children.) When it became clear he wouldn’t beat John Tory, Doug bowed out, turning his sights higher: to the Premier (think: Governor) of Ontario (the largest province in Canada, where he would get to boss around John Tory.)
Knowing Doug’s history at city council of being very friendly to campaign donors, a group of construction developers decided to back Doug’s campaign. Together, they contributed a rather paltry $150,000 for his campaign, and they have since profited handsomely on their investments with political concessions that equal dollars orders of magnitude larger than the investments, such as allowing nearly all construction to continue during the pandemic with extended hours.
Doug ran on two campaign policies: Cancelling Ontario’s comprehensive sex education, which had been retooled to include consent education and recognition of same sex families, and “Buck a Beer” which was a plan to change a law so that beer companies could sell beer at a lower unit price: one dollar (Loonie) each. He won a decisive victory. (The beer price would last less than two months and he would capitulate on the sex education) Doug set his sights on dismantling the social safety net that the Liberals had slowly but surely built over their 15 years in office. Number one on the chopping block: a Paid Sick Days program whereby all workers would be covered for sick days by a government guarantee. He also cut budgets to long term care facilities.
Smash cut to: March 2020. It’s becoming clear that Covid is in Ontario and cities like New York have already instituted lockdowns in an effort to distance people and slow the spread. Doug Ford, faced with the possibility of tanking his own economy, which he had just rebranded on license plates as “A Place To Grow” and signs shouting “OPEN FOR BUSINESS,” (the license plates would be recalled by the government for being defective) decides to wait and see, stumbling out of the gate to an eventual lockdown that was more of a mockdown: White collar workers were immediately put on telecommuting, while “essential” workers (meaning anything really, the description was deliberately vague so as to allow employers to use discretion) were still being sent to work without protection and often into a much more high pressure situation than before.
The cases went up. But not by as much as America, so for a while, a lot of Ontarians thought “we’re doing OK.” But then the grandmas started dropping like flies.
It turns out, making severe cuts to public nursing home facilities and not inspecting private facilities led to a nursing home crisis so extreme, for a while the military had to be called in to take care of it and investigate. The findings were the stuff of nightmares. To date, Ontario’s long term care deaths lead the world.
There was collateral damage from these outbreaks too: Personal Care Workers and nurses, many of which were from Toronto’s North-Western corner, often living in multi-generational homes, and most from racialized backgrounds, due to the Canadian version of Redlining, were spreading the disease to their family members, most of which had those “essential” jobs, and they ended up taking the disease with them to their workplaces because they didn’t have guaranteed paid sick days.
The numbers continued to rise. It looked bad, but many white Canadians didn’t know a single person who had the disease. Some of them began to call Covid ‘overblown’ and demanded to “reopen the economy.” Because racialized death has never been a cause for concern for Doug Ford (he never once voted for a policy to directly help racialized communities while a city councillor), he began to lean into the reopening of the economy way too early and very much against medical advice. For months, we didn’t ever see the “medical experts’ he was consulting. He would eventually find some bootlickers to go on TV and downplay the effects of the virus, and really destabilize what a lot of low information people in Ontario thought was true.
The numbers continued to rise. Construction sites were allowed to run and their hours of operation were increased. Factories that process meat and consumer packaged goods were allowed to stay open and were constantly having outbreaks. Many workplaces weren’t even reporting outbreaks, it would be revealed, making contact tracing next to impossible.
The solution? Open the economy up more: reopening gyms and casinos. We started to hear more about how the ‘mental health effects of the pandemic’ were ‘worse’ than the physical toll (no thought was ever given to the mental health effects of lifting the restrictions on funerals, which remain mostly private affairs where sometimes grandchildren find themselves off the guest list.)
The numbers rose again and again. At this stage, modelling was coming in warning of a second wave that would make the first look like a cakewalk. The solution was to ignore that advice and keep beating the drum about reopening the economy and also platforming the anti-mask, anti-lockdown groups which seemed to all be affiliated with white supremacist or heavily evangelical Christian fringe movements. The message was clear: we WILL kill your grandmas to grease the wheels of capitalism.
But suddenly in the fall, we passed a positivity rate milestone: 4% then another: 5.1% just weeks later. The federal government sent the provinces money- 19 Billion in total, which was intended to expand contact tracing, testing, and retrofit buildings like schools and workplaces to make them more safe. The Ford government sat on the lion’s share of the money for months.
Then modelling came out saying that if Christmas was allowed to happen, Ontario would be well and truly fucked. Christmas wasn’t cancelled. The premier would announce a ‘lockdown’ (mockdown) that would begin… on Boxing Day (December 26th. The day after everyone had gone to their cottages or visited relatives to spread the virus (many people, including members of parliament) flaunted the fact they were determined to spend the holidays with large groups of people under the misapprehension that if you aren’t scared, you can’t catch the virus. (The virus is not bees. You’re thinking of bees.)
The numbers spiked in January. There was a lot of talk, but zero action. More workplace outbreaks happened. The modelling was getting more dire and so were the positivity rates.
But then, it was announced that gyms, casinos, BARS and INDOOR DINING would reopen. At this point, people began to scream that they did not want this. They wanted to feel safe.
During this time, schools were beginning to regularly test positive for cases, but rather than send kids home as happened in March 2020, the minister of education kept touting that “kids belong in schools” (so their parents could go back to work.) Cases continued to climb and schools began to get shut down with outbreaks.
Then, they postponed March break. This was touted as a solution somehow to the problem (the problem being that kids were contracting Covid at school and making them continue to go to school was somehow helping?)
That’s how we ended up with case counts and positivity rates that are outstripping American figures every day with no end in sight.
When demanded by opposition parties, medical professionals, the public, and the media to re-introduce paid sick days, Ford flat out refused, saying there was “no reason” for them.
But he was working fast and furiously on a plan: A plan to build a highway to nowhere that oddly enough would pass by some strategically positioned parcels of land, owned by his previous campaign backers. The story was broken by the Toronto Star, and while citizens have been protesting and mayors have been denouncing the project, the project has not been shelved. The money we “didn’t have” for paid sick days and retrofitting schools with HEPA filters suddenly was ready to go to break ground on a highway nobody asked for.
In spring, it was announced that three vaccines had been given the green light from Canada’s version of the FDA, Health Canada. Justin Trudeau made a big show of putting the military in charge of the procurement and disbursement process, which was glacial, due to Canada having to purchase every single vial from the United States due to its inability to produce vaccines domestically.
Once the vaccines were in Ontario, the problems only worsened. The vaccines were sitting in freezers. Mass vaccination clinics (similar to the Javits center location in New York City) were opened and immediately closed due to vaccine supply. Privately owned pharmacies were put in the queue to receive vaccines but they weren’t arriving. People were scrambling trying to figure out how to get their elderly family members vaccinated, only to find out that the only way to do that was to navigate a series of websites with conflicting information. The situation was so bad, a rogue twitter account is compiling the information and tweeting it out as slots become available. When asked about this roll out in a press conference, Doug Ford made fun of the stupidity of his own constituents for being unable to figure the system out.
Then, the bickering broke out between the Provincial and Federal governments. Ford claimed the vaccines weren’t where Ministry of Health reporting declared they were, and Justin Trudeau, in lieu of finding a procedural solution, decided to try deputizing the Red Cross. The offer was refused by Doug Ford.
This was avoidable. Canada has a law called the Emergencies Act which basically gives unlimited power to the federal government to, among other things, institute complete lockdowns coast-to-coast, shut down the provincial borders, and yes, take over vaccine distribution. The feds are only now getting around to considering how they might be able to take control of Ontario, but are still reticent to just jump in and help people, while Doug Ford is posturing in the media that there’s a “vaccine shortage” despite there being 1.2 million doses of vaccines sitting in freezers across Ontario while vaccination has been slow.
Many jokes have been made about how Doug Ford was a small time hash dealer in the 1980s with his brother Randy, and now he’s had two at bats: Provincial marijuana retail (he somehow managed to lose over $42 million dollars in the first year selling weed… to CANADIANS) and Covid vaccine distribution, and he hasn’t been able to complete the transaction properly on either front. This joke assumes that competence is the goal. With Doug Ford, he has two white whales he’d like to deliver: Privatizing education, and privatizing our OHIP (Ontario Health Insurance Plan), and what we’ve learned from Maggie Thatcher’s reign of terror is that in order to privatize something, you must demonize it and prove its ineffectiveness. Doug Ford is currently deep into the process of achieving both, and Canadians are paying with their lives and livelihoods.
-Karen Geier is a writer and content strategist living in Toronto with her dog Pee Wee. Follow her at @karengeier