Stop arbitrary enforcement of health orders

New information released by civil liberties groups this week shows we need a total rethink of the approach to getting out of the lockdown on COVID -19.

A video went viral in April. In it, 31-year-old entertainer Adley Stump did a parody of a public health news conference in a mocking attempt to clear up confusion surrounding the rules about what must and must not be done during the public health crisis.

“First, you must not leave the house for any reason, unless, of course, you have a reason and then you may leave the house,” she said in the video.

“All stores are closed, except those that are open. And all stores must close unless, of course, they need to stay open.

“We should stay locked down until the virus stops infecting people, and it will only stop infecting people if enough of us get infected that we build immunity. So it is very important that we get infected and also do not get infected.”

It goes on dropping truth bombs about the absurdity of conflicting health orders for more than three minutes, but you get the idea.

If it were only parody we could all laugh. But a new report by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association shows the uneven enforcement of COVID health orders is no laughing matter. Over 10,000 fines and penalties have been levied, with Quebec leading the way with 6,600 charges, followed by Ontario (2,853 charges) and Nova Scotia (555 charges). There were 129 tickets handed out in Alberta.

The main conclusion? “Overzealous, technical enforcement of confusing, broad and vague laws frequently led to fines that were completely disconnected with the goal of protecting public health.”

An Ottawa family out for a bike ride stopped for a drink and the kids went briefly into an area an officer determined was restricted, even though it wasn’t taped off. It was an $880 ticket, delivered — incidentally — with the officer handling the parents’ ID without any gloves or sanitary procedures.

An 80-year-old woman was ticketed by six bylaw officers (who weren’t practising social distancing) while she was alone in a quiet area of a park foraging for greens like garlic mustard and stinging nettles. “These greens will go down in history as possibly the most expensive in the world!” she said.

Fines have generated an estimated $13 million for governments. But that’s not the worst of it. There is evidence that the laws are being enforced disproportionately on marginalized individuals.

A worker for the Indigenous Support Worker Project in Montreal was doing a check-in with the homeless and received a $1,500 fine, was arrested and charged with obstruction of a police officer.

Then there are disturbing stories of Black and gay couples being stopped, aggressively questioned and threatened with arrest and jail if they questioned the authority of the officer writing up the ticket.

This should not be a surprise that stories like this are emerging: If rules are arbitrary and unclear, it is left to the discretion of each officer on how to enforce them.

Left unchecked, this will be a growing problem. Because if rules don’t make sense, people will ignore them, and when people stop listening to authority there will be more defiance and more escalation.

The solution is simple: officers need to stop ticketing healthy people. Full stop.

Instead, alarmingly, politicians are in no hurry to give up these controls. They are doubling down. The Alberta government is in the process of passing Bill 24, which the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms calls “one more dangerous, authoritarian law,” giving the health minister the latitude to issue public health orders indefinitely.

In Alberta, the public health emergency is over. This is not only technically true — the emergency order expired on June 15 and was not renewed — it is actually true. There were 538 cases in all of Alberta (as of the morning of June 25) and most of them are in Calgary or Edmonton. That means the vast majority of Alberta communities have zero cases. How do you get safer than zero cases? And if zero cases are not enough to move to Stage 3 and return to normal life in these communities, what is?

Are we waiting until the virus has been eradicated from Alberta? Until they get it under control in the nursing homes in Quebec? Until it’s gone from the entire planet?

It shouldn’t just be civil liberties groups asking these questions. We should all be asking: When do we get our freedoms back?