Rebellion triggered by a Snickers
Having lived the vast majority of my life in Toronto, having marinated in and studied closely the Upper Canadian temperament, not much about this city’s and this province’s reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic has surprised me.
And when it has, it has mostly been a matter of exceeding expectations. Even crazier bylaws ( no standing still in parks!), even more obnoxious and capricious enforcement thereof, than I expected. Even more relentlessly worst- case- scenario- obsessed media coverage. Even shriller judgment from lockdown maximalists toward anyone with a moderately different view.
Basically, Ontario was even more Ontarian than I realized.
Monday’s outburst of frustration among big- city elites over Halloweeen, however, I absolutely did not see coming.
At a press conference, Dr. David Williams, Ontario’s hopelessly- over- hishead chief medical officer of health, strongly recommended against trick- ortreating in “modified Stage 2 reopening” regions of the province — that’s Ottawa, Toronto, Peel Region and York Region, where dining rooms, cinemas, gyms and other indoor venues have recently been shuttered.
The negative reviews came thick and fast, not least from journalists — who have generally been at the maximalist vanguard — both in print and on social media. “Ford plays a nasty Halloween trick,” the Toronto Star editorial was headlined. The Globe and Mail’s André Picard called it “an act of ghoulish politics.”
Our children have sacrificed so much! Please not this as well!
The frustration was compounded later in the day when the province proudly announced it was allowing dance studios to reopen in the no trick- or- treating zones — but not gyms, and not dining rooms. Consistency has not been a reasonable expectation of government officials hereabouts since spring, but that’s just ridiculous.
It’s true, of course, that trick-or-treating ought to be safe. Kids and parents will wear masks and sanitize their hands twice a minute. They’ll keep their distance. If they trick- or- treat among single- family homes, they’ll be outdoors. Every other province has signed off on trick- or- treating, as did federal public health leaders Dr. Howard Njoo and Dr. Theresa Tam last week. Every epidemiologist and infectious disease expert routinely quoted in the media seems to agree.
It’s a quintessentially Ontarian situation, but no less absurd for that. The only thing more absurd was that people were on tenterhooks waiting for Williams’ verdict. The man has been completely discredited three times over. The media recently spent two weeks yelling at him for not shutting down indoor dining in Toronto, despite an urgent request from Dr. Eileen de Villa, the city’s medical officer of health. And then, when case counts were much higher, Williams finally relented, thus achieving the worst of both worlds.
Halloween is not banned. No one’s plans for important days should be hinging on this man’s or this government’s say- so. If you’re so dumb that you haven’t yet figured out what’s mostly safe and what’s not, it seems unlikely you’re following government advice to the letter anyway.
That said, de Villa agrees with Williams about trickor- treating, and so do her counterparts in Ontario’s other COVID-19 hot zones. Many of the people decrying Williams’ advice were lauding de Villa’s just two weeks ago in the name of maximum safety. As I write this, Williams seems to be attracting roughly 100 per cent of the scorn, and de Villa and her municipal counterparts roughly zero.
It’s almost as if some of us are looking for a villain to justify breaking the rules — as if, after seven months, their innate, inexplicable preferences are gradually overcoming our preternatural Ontarian caution and fetish for rule-following.
I expected Ontario’s chattering classes would agree with the majority, as polls have suggested they do on most COVID- 19 restrictions: the stricter, the better. Léger’s Oct. 6 poll for the Association for Canadian Studies found that among parents who let their kids trick-or-treat last year, 67 per cent said they wouldn’t be doing so this year. Fifty-eight per cent agreed that “governments ( should) step in and cancel Halloween.”
Wandering around with a bunch of strangers and neighbours we’ve been studiously avoiding for half a year? Madness! What if a kid gets a runny nose and takes his mask off!
But clearly some of us care much more about trick- ortreating than I realized. And I suspect we’ll see Ontarians of all stripes justifying indulging their preferences more and more as time goes on.
The rules and recommendations that have been in place — permanently and intermittently — since the spring have always been manifestly unsustainable. Unless a vaccine materializes on a miraculous timeline, and barring some massive surge in hospitalizations or deaths, it’s just a question of who’s going to snap when. At some point kids need to see their grandparents and vice versa. They need to get outdoors on their own with their friends. Their parents need to play beer league hockey. The good people of Rosedale and Forest Hill didn’t pay $ 50,000 to join a private ski club up north just to sit by the fireplace for a whole winter. And some of us might want to dine out alone or in small groups, in well-spaced restaurants with very stringent measures in place, and not have to huddle under a blanket on a patio or be berated for our negligence.
I sense rebellion afoot. I hope Ontarians who feel comfortable with it do go out trick- or- treating this year, despite the province’s silly warnings. Without meaning to, they might fire the first shots in a wider war of liberation.