COVID curfew laws deserve to be broken
Never having seen a general curfew in action in Canada, on account of it being a free country and all, I was curious just how zealously the Quebec constabulary would enforce the 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. stay-at-home order Premier François Legault announced last week. Demonstrations and protests are explicitly exempt from Quebec's rules governing public gatherings, after all — even demonstrations and protests against the rules. Would the cops really go after people out for an evening constitutional?
If they're out for an evening constitutional to make a point, the answer seems to be yes. On Saturday, Montreal police charged 84 anti-curfew radicals with existing in public after 8 p.m.; their colleagues in Quebec City, Trois-Rivières, Sherbrooke and Gatineau added to an impressive provincewide haul of more than 150 infractions, each weighing in at a minimum $1,550. A CROP poll released Saturday found 70 per cent of Quebecers support this, despite government officials freely admitting they have no concrete evidence to justify it.
It can hardly be overstated what a desperate, flailing guess Legault's government is making here. A French study mentioned in at least two Canadian media reports seems to be the closest thing anyone can find to supporting evidence. Its authors are at pains to stress they had no control group, and that their work does not illustrate causation rather than correlation. And the positive effect they cautiously attribute to curfews in France involves preventing senior citizens from bucking self-isolation rules and recommendations and “seeing their children or other people,” as economist Patrick Pintus, one of the study's authors, told La Presse last week.
In Ontario and Quebec, public health officials seem far more concerned with behind-closeddoors socialization among younger people that eventually filters into long-term care home systems that neither province has managed to safeguard. If Canadian seniors aren't taking whatever precautions they can by now, after nine no-doubt frightening months being hung out to dry, it seems highly unlikely a curfew would finally make the difference.
Ontario's situation is considerably less dire than Quebec's, with just one-third the death rate — though Quebec's death rate is higher than any OECD country save Belgium's. So Legault's curfew put added pressure on Premier Doug Ford to ramp up his own package of restrictions on everyday life, especially since he insists new pandemic modelling coming Tuesday will make us all “fall off our chair.”
Reports Monday suggest Ontario's experts do not deem curfews necessary. Having picked themselves up off the floor, it seems Ontarians will be free to walk off the shock long into the evening. A Maru/Blue Public Opinion survey conducted last week for Postmedia found just 49 per cent of Ontarians supported the idea of an 8 p.m. curfew, as opposed to 70 per cent of Quebecers.
And polls aside, my unscientific observations suggest there is considerable aversion to curfews among my fellow Upper Canadian elites, most of whom are staunchly pro-lockdown. Many seem to think it's cruel, stupid and useless to, for example, forbid people from taking an evening walk. And they are correct.
I'm also not at all sure Ontario police forces, unlike their Quebec counterparts, would enforce curfews if they were implemented. For the same reason, I have always struggled to envision them setting up roadblocks to prevent travel to second homes, randomly checking people on the street to ensure they are no more than one or two or five kilometres from home, forcibly confining thousands of poor people to their apartment buildings 24 hours a day for two weeks, or any of the other draconian measures Ontario's lockdown-maximalist crowd support under the banner of “it worked in Melbourne.” They aren't above overreach, goodness knows, but this isn't the sort of thing they normally go in for.
Ontario police forces proudly enforce whichever laws they want to enforce, and proudly do not enforce whichever laws they do not want to enforce, and most of the time politicians are totally fine with that. It's only in extremes that it becomes a problem for the politicians nominally overseeing them: when the Ontario Provincial Police won't enforce an injunction ordering protesters off CN's main railway line, say, or when Toronto police all but abandon traffic enforcement despite soaring pedestrian and cyclist death tolls.
Ontario police forces have raised no objections to many large, peaceful and plainly illegal public protests over the course of the pandemic, in support of everything from Black Lives Matter to Sikh farmers to ending lockdown measures. (Ontario does not share Quebec's exemption to public-gathering laws for protests.) The only reason they might be willing to ticket people out for a manifestly harmless — no, manifestly healthy — evening walk is because it's a lot easier than taking on a crowd.
That would be an absolutely terrible reason, to no plausible compelling benefit. But it would neatly encapsulate the basic raw deal that law-abiding Canadians have got from their governments ever since March: They don't know how to get at the people who pose the real problem, so they're going to make life progressively more miserable for the people they can get at.
No deal. Enough. Curfews, more than any other lockdown measure, deserve every ounce of pushback they get.