Odds are the province’s measures will fit the pattern of not doing enough.

The premier of Ontario has spent several weeks telling us he will not hesitate to take serious action, and Friday may be the day it finally comes true. Peel is expected to be locked down; Toronto and York may be, too. If you wait long enough, almost anything can happen.

Well, maybe not anything. Here’s the betting favourite for what transpires: Doug Ford will come out grim-faced, and will use his most serious voice. He will announce regional restrictions to avoid hospitals being overwhelmed. He will emphasize how he hates to do this, because he hears from business owners all the time, and he knows it’s tough for businesses out there. He will say this is the last thing he wanted to do.

And the announcement won’t be enough. It will be welcome, because the province has been trying to muddle down the middle of the road in a misguided effort to keep businesses open. Economist Stephen Gordon of Laval University says that jurisdictions with lax measures haven’t actually seen measurably better economic activity.

“Certainly economists don’t view it as a conflict between public health and economics,” says Gordon. “We believe the issue of what measures to take is really a public health issue, and the economic issue is, how best to clean up after it? This is not an economic problem; it’s a public health problem.

“There’s going to be economic costs either way. You can say restaurants are open, but if there’s a pandemic going on, who’s going to take their life in their hands to go to a restaurant? So as far as the economic argument, the costs are going to be unevenly distributed. So we should do our best to help out people who are hurt.”

The announcement will be weeks late, with Peel already at almost double the grotesquely inflated red-zone thresholds the province had to reduce last week, and with some intensive care units starting to hit dangerous levels.

And if you’re betting, the announcement won’t come with expanded paid sick leave, which was asked for by the collected mayors of the Greater Toronto Area this week. It won’t come with direct supports to businesses beyond measures already announced, which from the province are primarily tax deferrals and offers of loans.

And it won’t come with isolation facilities, which, as Vox reported this week, Vermont has used in concert with programs to identify and protect the vulnerable; Vermont is one of the bare few success stories in the United States. Here, isolation facilities in Toronto and Peel have been federally funded after the province wouldn’t do it.

So lockdowns will likely reduce most people’s contact rates, and therefore interrupt the growth of COVID-19. Intervention is welcome, because it’s needed. But it will be surprising if Ontario does enough.

“You cannot beat COVID if you don’t protect front-line workers and marginalized communities,” said Joe Cressy, Toronto city councillor and head of the Toronto Board of Health. “You can’t.

“And that’s what happened in the first wave. Predominantly middle- and upper-incomes families and individuals, disproportionately white, cocooned safely during lockdowns. And the pandemic played out in hard-hit, poor neighbourhoods. So not only did we not beat COVID, but it was the poor people who paid the price for that.”

Indeed, when lockdowns hit the first time, it reduced infection rates for the rich, but not the poor. The hardest-hit area was the city’s northwest corner, and the most crowded ICUs in Toronto are now in the northeast corner.

Test positivity is spiking in Toronto’s poorest, most racialized neighbourhoods again.

Toronto Public Health data shows that among households with income under $50,000, 32 per cent have seen income greatly impacted or stopped, and 43 per cent reported that income loss had a major effect on their daily needs.

And then there is Peel, which has a disproportionate number of precarious workers doing essential jobs who live in congregate housing.

“Brampton has one of the highest percentages of essential workers,” Mayor Patrick Brown said Wednesday. “And if you look at the particular area that was highlighted in the Toronto Star article, this has one of the highest level of factory workers, people who work in industrial settings, essential workers and transportation logistics, food processing.

“These are unsung pandemic heroes, and rather than fingerpointing at people who are taking on necessary work, I really believe we need to say, what can we do to support then?

“I hear again and again it’s too difficult to get sick benefits, and people are going to work when they have symptoms, people are going to work because they can’t afford to lose their job. They don’t have time to wait for six months of paperwork from Ottawa to get that sick-benefit payment back; they can’t afford to miss a paycheque.”

When paid sick leave is brought up, Ford talks about provincial legislation passed in March that gave workers protection from being fired for missing 10 days of work to be sick, and those federal benefits that are hard to reach. Meanwhile, there is testing hesitancy in lower-income neighbourhoods because people are worried they’ll lose a job, or income they can’t afford to lose, if they test positive. So some go to work sick.

“We need further restrictions to reduce contact, and those measures are critical to reduce transmission, but if they don’t come alongside supports for front-line workers, then we are going to see the first wave play itself out all over again,” says Cressy. “Where we spike the wave, but those on the margins will continue to be infected, and will pay the hardest economic price for it as well.”

“(Ford) says he’s sticking up for the little guy, and I think he actually means that,” says epidemiologist Dr. Nitin Mohan, who teaches public and global health at Western University, and co-founded ETIO, a public health consulting firm.

“The problem is his interpretation of the little guy, because the data is out, and the communities that are the hardest hit are the most vulnerable communities. And if he doesn’t view them as the little guys, it tells you something about why we’re stuck with the systemic issues that we see.”

Maybe that changes Friday, but the odds are it will fit the pattern of not doing enough. Because that, broadly, has been the plan.

FRANK GUNN THE CANADIAN PRESS FILE PHOTO Premier Doug Ford doesn’t seem to understand that paid sick leave and isolation centres are two simple and effective ways to protect Ontario’s most vulnerable workers, Bruce Arthur writes.