Being lazy about following the rules got us here
Walking at dull and dreary Bay and Bloor just before Monday’s coming lockdown offered a sensation I hadn’t had in years: apprehension.
Careful about spending during the pandemic, I felt like a student again, new to Toronto on streets that seemed hostile, as if I were a city castaway in a Dickens novel hoping for kindness and a bit of gruel.
Toronto was so dreary in those days, and it is again now.
Student-poor means living daily in a constricted way, but with family to turn to in extremis. You are not living in the daily emergency that is poverty. But many people are now, and the streets are empty in the second wave of COVID-19. Who would buy?
Last Thursday, most shops didn’t open until 11 a.m., and the others were open but not respecting physical distancing, which was unsettling. It’s good to see Premier Doug Ford close stores beyond essential ones, and to limit mall retail to curbside pickup. It’s also good to see restrictions on casinos, religious gatherings and weddings. How could anyone have thought such gatherings were essential in these times?
We have been blithe about COVID-19, we thought the first wave couldn’t return though we were warned it would. Now we are headed into something severe this winter, and it starts on Monday morning.
Bloor will be even more blank that day. What a strange scene it will be. Every city has a richpeople shopping street like Bloor, distinct from streets that are plain like Gerrard or grungy like Bathurst or dotted with gems like College or expensive
cool and packed with pleasure like King Street W. Some bars and restaurants that packed in too much pleasure on King West got shut down.
Rich streets always feel slightly dead, and ugly despite expensive materials used by modernist architects. Ugly is chic. Wherever rich people live, it’s only part-time. There is almost nowhere to eat.
Back when Toronto was boring, there was always a place to eat, everywhere. The food wasn’t good but there was plenty to hand. There wasn’t endless fashion and gear and homewares to buy in Toronto then because globalization hadn’t yet happened. In this new era it became available everywhere at all times, plenty of choice but not necessarily nicer things.
Right now as I walk along my
street, the only evidence of shopping is the litter of Amazon packaging tossed by porch thieves.
A Guardian columnist describes this feeling in lockdown London: “My life feels the same as when I was 21, and the world was my oyster, and the low availability of unusual luxury items was as nothing, set against the sheer human vigour coursing through my veins.”
The pandemic has put an end to that. Youth doesn’t help. Students, short of money, work and in-person classes, are having an appalling year. So are many people.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau put it well in his update on Friday. We have framed this all wrong, saying the pandemic means people’s health versus the health of the economy.
Doug Ford has certainly done this, being partial to business giveaways on condo construction and suburban sprawl.
But Trudeau sees people and the economy as interdependent, the health of the economy depending on public health. “Going into lockdowns and supporting businesses while we’re in that lockdown is a better way of ensuring their success in a few months, in a few years, than trying to tough through a virus that is running around unchecked,” he said.
To that end, he is offering more money to help businesses directly.
There will be no holidays this December, not as we knew them. “We are facing (a) winter that’s going to drive people inside more and more, and we’re really at risk of seeing caseloads go up, and hospitals
get overwhelmed, and more loved ones dying,” he said.
“So we need to do everything we can right now to slow the spread of COVID-19, to stop the spike in its tracks.” It means I should not have been trying to shop on Bloor at all. People should not have been trying to cram in hair appointments before new rules came down.
It defeats the spirit of the effort we will have to make. I will never understand the people who won’t wear masks, carefree with their own health and the health of others. If we all masked, this would end so much sooner.
Is it Trumpism that made us lazy about following the rules? It was certainly un-Canadian and I hope we’ll revert to type in the months to come.