National Post (National Edition)
I hate to say this, but …
It’s amazing how many sentences I’ve been starting with the words, “I hate to say this, but …” I hate to say this, but there has never been a better time to be a cyclist. I hate to say this, but I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to sit down to a home-cooked meal with my family every night. I hate to say this, but being cooped up inside has given me a chance to do home renovation projects that I’ve been putting off for a decade.
People are dying from COVID-19, and will continue to die. In the grand scheme, my tiny consolations are trivial, which is why I feel guilty when I describe them. Yet I remind myself that our short lives aren’t experienced in the “grand scheme.” They are experienced from the inside — as fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, friends and neighbours. I’ve spent the past month building Lego projects with my seven-yearold daughter. And when she is an old lady, and COVID-19 is spoken of in dim memory the way we speak of the Spanish flu today, I’m hoping that at least one of these brightly coloured constructions will remain in her home, and that she will still look at it and remember the wonderful hours we spent together building it. There may never be another time when I have her all to myself.
In Toronto, where we live, the weather has been weird in recent weeks, with uncommonly strong winds and temperatures that make it feel more like early March. But when the sun does make an appearance, the moms and dads are out teaching young children to ride bikes. This, too, leads to unforgettable moments — that half-euphoric, half-heartbreaking instant when you let go of the back of the seat and watch your child pedal off in a squeal of noisy triumph.
Until a few days ago, some of the parents in my neighbourhood were using the paved area of the local school playground for this purpose. But then the city put up yellow tape and declared the whole area off limits. This came amid media reports of police threatening to arrest Ontarians for simply standing around their driveways talking to neighbours. There’s a small park nearby where dog owners occasionally stop to chat at long distance. It’s a completely safe practice. Yet the police stationed a cruiser on a nearby curb, so officers could roll down the window and yell at everyone to go home.
Such heavy-handed measures didn’t arouse much opposition in the early days of the pandemic, when we still had little knowledge of the way COVID-19 is transmitted. We erred on the side of caution, and understandably so. But we now know a lot more. And this kind of unjustified public-health authoritarianism now exists mostly as a medicalized variant of puritanism, as H.L. Mencken once defined that word: “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
One detects the unspoken premise that any kind of positive experience — even a safe one — represents an affront to the preferred spirit of suffering and sacrifice. In Colorado, a former police officer recently was arrested for throwing a ball with his six-year-old daughter. She will spend the rest of her life with the memory of watching daddy being handcuffed. This is insane.
I am not a civil-liberties extremist. If someone throws a house party amid a pandemic, the police should bust it up. Although I believe in freedom of conscience and worship, I’m all in favour of arresting priests, ministers, rabbis and mullahs who insist on summoning their flocks to collective prayer. But outdoor social contact is much safer than its indoor equivalent, because, other factors being equal, the same infected droplets that would otherwise concentrate in unventilated indoor spaces are whisked away by even slight breezes. And so it is beyond maddening that the same Ontario government that’s keeping its liquor stores open seems perfectly OK with crackdowns on citizens who are doing nothing but — quite literally — standing outside at a safe distance and minding their own business.
Behind this authoritarian overreach lies an undisguised contempt for the intelligence of ordinary Canadians. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, was quite explicit about this in March, when she claimed that we were all too dumb to use masks without inadvertently sticking our infected fingers into our throats, noses or eyeballs. And mayors have justified the banning of driveway chats on the reefer-madness logic that seemingly innocent behaviour may act as a gateway activity. In Ottawa, for instance, residents are treated as criminals the moment their backsides hit a park bench, because we all know where bench-sitting leads, right?
Through their own actions, leaders have shown us that they don’t actually believe in the policies they inflict on us plebes. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed no shame after taking a break from lecturing Canadians about non-essential activities so he could click selfies at his country house. In Scotland, meanwhile, Chief Medical Officer Catherine Calderwood was forced to step down after being caught out in Trudeau-style cottaging hypocrisy not once, but twice. Unlike Trudeau or Calderwood, many ordinary people don’t have cottages or even backyards. So they rely on other forms of outdoor space. To adapt Anatole France, the law, in its majestic equality, now forbids the rich as well as the poor from using public parks.
There is a larger lesson here that every generation must learn afresh in troubled times: like the virome within a bat, there exists within all of us a dormant desire to force others to act, talk and think in a certain way. In normal times, we repress this instinct, as it conflicts with the dictates of liberalism (and the better angels of our nature, more generally). But during a crisis, checks and balances weaken, both at the level of politics and personal psychology.
I consider myself a pragmatist. And I recognize that there is a very real justification for the exercise of expanded government powers at this moment. Just as governments should have the power to prevent unvaccinated children from spreading measles in schools, officials should have broad authority to decide what businesses may open during a pandemic. But even a society under quasi-quarantine must remain alive to the threat of government overreach, especially since these laws will be around long after the masks have been stuffed into back drawers.
The authoritarian impulse exists on both sides of the political spectrum, and betrays itself at all scales, from the beat cop harassing a homeowner to a national leader neutering his parliament. In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban seized on the pandemic threat to rule indefinitely by decree, his government predictably has used its new powers to ram through measures that have nothing to do with disease prevention — such as stripping authority from mayors and thwarting investigations of infrastructure projects. In the United States, President Donald Trump has been telling Americans he has “total” authority. (State governors take a different view.) Here in Canada, the Liberals made a naked grab for unchecked fiscal powers that would have lasted till the end of 2021. And on Wednesday, Privy Council President Dominic LeBlanc said they were also considering a new law that would criminalize the spread of medical misinformation.
Surf the web for five minutes and you will find no shortage of COVID-19 conspiracy theories — including the claim that the disease is spread through 5G cell towers (a few of which have actually been burned down). But the law LeBlanc is floating would only exacerbate the larger distrust that acts as feedstock for conspiracism — especially coming from a government that was planning a creepy media-licensing regime long before COVID-19 hit. Since the iron law of censorship holds that every set of restrictions will metastasize along political and ideological lines, it isn’t unreasonable to fear that any ban on medical misinformation would one day be used by a future Conservative government to prosecute Theresa Tam or Health Minister Patty Hajdu for some of their mistakes about masks and travel bans. At the very least, it could be used to criminalize the widespread (but generally harmless) claims made on behalf of the “healing” bracelets, crystals, pendants and other assorted newage crap that’s sold at every health-food store in the country.
These are difficult times. But the period of initial shock is over. Testing is more widespread (though still inadequate), and intensive-care resources have been expanded. In Quebec, parts of East Asia and some European countries, plans are underway to cautiously reopen certain economic sectors. In other words, we are past the stage where needless authoritarian measures can be justified with airy appeals to public-health absolutism. As citizens, we have a duty to push back when authorities pretend otherwise.
Enough with the psychology of “I hate to say this, but.” Just because we’re all primarily concerned with our health doesn’t mean children should be deprived of safe outdoor recreation. Nor should their parents sit idly by as leaders everywhere demand powers that they don’t need and shouldn’t have.