National Post (National Edition)
Re-closing playgrounds a brand new low
If Ontario Premier Doug Ford's press conference at Queen's Park on Friday afternoon goes down in history as the death rattle of his Progressive Conservative government, it wouldn't be an injustice. For 13 maddening months, his crew have successfully combined relatively harsh anti-pandemic measures with relatively ineffective results. But on Friday, I kid you not, amid soaring case counts — doubling in a little over two weeks — Ford shut down the playgrounds again.
He shut them down across the province, no matter how few COVID-19 cases might be about, and right when a scientific consensus has taken hold that surface transmission isn't something to worry about very much.
Ford also closed golf courses, tennis courts and campgrounds, which also seems totally unsupportable: however much more transmissible the British variant dominant in Ontario might be outdoors, it is still vastly more transmissible indoors. Humans being social animals, some Ontarians will disobey a new rule never to gather even with a single other person they don't live with, and if they do disobey, it is highly desirable they do so outside rather than in.
Golf, tennis and camping aren't basic, universally accepted common goods the way playgrounds are, though, and they aren't really in season yet. No, for sheer, stupid, Dickensian cruelty, the playgrounds element is the worst. It's entirely worthy of a political epitaph.
Bad as it is on its own, though, it's far worse when you consider the stated rationale. “We've been ringing the alarm bells for weeks … We shut down our schools,” said Ford — referring to Monday's highly questionable provincewide shutdown of K-12 education after this week's spring break, the announcement coming a day after Education Minister Stephen Lecce assured parents it wouldn't happen.
“Most of the province has been in some form of lockdown since last fall,” Ford correctly observed. “We announced a second `stayat-home order' for all of Ontario. … The reality is there are few options left.”
First of all, that makes no sense. Ford hasn't tried shaving his head, wearing his shoes on the wrong feet or singing 9 to 5 to open every press conference to fight the pandemic either. Those “options” make roughly as much sense as closing playgrounds.
Second of all, what I described above as “relatively harsh anti-pandemic measures” have impacted different industries and people very differently. Food processing, agriculture, warehousing, construction, light industry and workplaces in general have been much freer to go about their daily business than restaurants, gyms, cinemas and other arguably less “essential” environments. You haven't been able to eat lunch on a restaurant patio in Toronto since November, with the exception of a staggeringly ham-handed two-week reprieve at the end of March that the Ontario Restaurants Association claims cost its members more than $100 million.
On Friday, Ford's government announced the closure of “all non-essential workplaces in the construction sector” — “non-essential” being undefined as of press time, though the press release also announced the government was “dispatching 200 workplace inspectors, supported by provincial offences officers, to visit 1,300 constructions sites to enforce COVID-19 safety requirements.” So presumably at least 1,300 are essential.
The province also announced a weekend blitz on “workplaces … in the COVID-19 hot spots of Ottawa, Toronto and York Region,” including “big-box stores, food processors, manufacturers and warehouses.” It announced an intention — take this with a grain of salt, I would say — to set up checkpoints limiting travel across the Quebec and Manitoba borders. And it quite rightly implored the federal government to do more, as opposed to almost nothing, to keep variants of concern out of the country.
Ottawa's “mandatory hotel quarantine” is a proven joke. On Friday the Toronto Sun reported that Public Health Canada's decision to stop screening travellers from Brazil for the P.1 variant was down to the strain “no longer (being) limited to Brazil and (being) found in a range of countries, including Canada.” You would think the feds had never vowed to keep such strains out.
We shall see how sharp the teeth are on Ontario's various measures; all have been promised before, to no great obvious effect. But all of those measures would have been more compelling without closing playgrounds, campgrounds and golf courses — oh, and without announcing that police officers had new powers to enforce the stay-at-home order. From now on, apparently, they can pull you over or stop you on the sidewalk and demand to know why you're out of the house, on pain of a $750 fine.
It's a high bar in Canada to get an injunction against something like that. Judges generally defer to the purposes governments articulate for the rule in question, and we are certainly fighting a battle that requires extraordinary measures. But I wouldn't want to be the premier, health minister or government lawyer trying to defend this appalling mess, either in the court of law or of popular opinion.
This is a brand new low, and even pliable Ontarians might not tolerate it.