It’s a good time to keep our politics in perspective
On Monday, the federal government finally erected quarantine barriers at our international airports to stop the spread of COVID-19. About a year late.
Ever since late November, we have largely locked down the Greater Toronto Area while leaving our airport wide open in the thick of things. It was the gaping hole in the GTA doughnut — a pathway for a pathogen transported by passengers from across the planet.
When Premier Doug Ford pointed out this self-defeating contradiction — the lunacy of keeping open a back door to the virus and the variants flown in from abroad, while the front doors of most stores and homes on the home front were sealed by provincial order — the response was both deafening and confounding:
Critics lashed out at the premier for purportedly playing politics. They opted to be political and ideological, instead of epidemiological and empirical.
They accused Ford of deflection, distraction and detraction. They wanted Ontario locked down tighter, longer, while leaving the airport looser and laxer, on the grounds that a minuscule percentage of passengers tested positive with COVID-19.
The intellectual dishonesty and scientific distortion were breathtaking.
“Asking to close the borders sets up the idea of us versus them,” claimed Dr. Gerald Evans, chair of the division of infectious diseases at Queen’s University, quoted in this newspaper last month. “It’s simplistic thinking; it’s not us, it’s them, and if we just keep them out, we’ll prevent it. These variants are already here, certainly the U.K. one is.”
It doesn’t get more mischievous and vacuous than that: Evans notes the U.K. variant is “already here”; hence, he argues, it’s “simplistic” to try stopping, say, the far deadlier South African variant, or the Brazilian, or any other?
All it takes is a few infected passengers on every flight, every day, to transform an airport tarmac into Ground Zero, over and over again, multiplying exponentially across provincial terrain. Which is precisely what happened in the intervening two months since Ontario requested full screening and quarantining of arriving passengers.
Exasperated by the federal inaction, the province stepped in with mandatory testing of its own last month until Ottawa could plug the gap. But it was a stopgap.
Ford is no hero here. He refused to make masks mandatory last summer, fobbing it off on municipalities (they rose to the challenge while the premier ducked).
The bigger point is that we picayune Canadians are so quick to contempt that we suffer from cognitive dissonance (discomfort from holding conflicting ideas simultaneously): If Ford is so right wing and often wrong-headed on other policies, it is hard to admit that the premier (and his non-partisan medical advisers) can sometimes be right about some of their pandemic decisions.
Blessedly, if belatedly, the federal Liberals finally conceded that Ontario’s Tories had a point about airport leakage. Unlike some of the more politically conflicted critics, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and deputy PM Chrystia Freeland took off their blinkers and did the right thing (not the rightwing thing) at Pearson.
The quarantine controversy is a reminder of why we need to keep the politics of a pandemic in perspective. The vaccination rollout is another example of how easy it is to go down rabbit holes that will bog down the effort to save human lives.
Ontarians are ornery at the moment, and everyone is feeling vulnerable. The last thing we need now is to complicate a delicate deployment by injecting yet more layers of selective second guessing about who deserves the vaccine more than others.
Triage is an imperfect art and an artful science. It is a judgment call that invites endless second guessing.
On balance, it feels as if Ontario’s priorities are now about right. More health professionals are getting injected, but anyone 80 and over is also eligible for the current round (if only they knew where and when to go for their shots, as I argued in Saturday’s column).
By the next phase, in April, age will be the predominant determinant for vaccination, on the scientific grounds that age has the clearest correlation to vulnerability. Sounds straightforward, but there’s a Canadian curveball.
The suggestion this month that adults from racialized communities disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic should be prioritized for shots is controversial. Few would deny the assertion from Canada’s National Advisory Committee on immunization that, broadly speaking, some racialized communities are more vulnerable; but it is easier said than done — a remedy that is a recipe for complexity, confusion and diversion.
Ontario is already giving priority to all Indigenous adults, which few would quibble with given their clearly identifiable vulnerabilities (and the fact that card-carrying status Indians can easily identify themselves). But trying to rank Black and brown and other racialized Canadians based on colour and class, and branding them based on postal code or privilege, adds a layer of improvisation that defies easy classification.
There are surely good arguments to be made for giving teachers priority vaccinations, but also supermarket cashiers; bus drivers, though not subway operators (safely ensconced in their cabs); taxi drivers, too, which opens the door to any Uber driver.
But picking and choosing, and getting bogged down in disputes over who is most deserving, is merely a road map for roadblocks. In the final analysis, complexity is the enemy of simplicity, efficiency and rapidity.
When a coronavirus and its variants go viral, speed is the best defence. Rough justice will get us further, and prove fairer, in the end.
There is a fine line between equity and efficacy beyond which you are chasing your tail. Achieving the threshold of herd immunity is critical because it fosters the conditions where even those who are unvaccinated do not go unprotected.
Making a special effort, going the extra mile, doing dedicated outreach, opening up pop-ups — all of that makes sense for vulnerable communities. But holding everyone back until every vulnerable group is taken care of will only slow us down.
Vaccination is not a zero sum game, nor a political game. It is first and foremost a public health emergency — for the public at large.