This time, Ford got it right, more or less.
Perhaps when you are being hidden to avoid a negative outcome, it’s easier to tell others to do the same. Premier Doug Ford emerged from much talked-about obscurity Thursday to announce the only logical decision in an illogical province: extending Ontario’s stay-at-home order for two weeks, to at least June 2. The measures themselves could be better. The results have been pretty welcome, though.
“These are precious weeks we won’t put to waste,” said Ford.
Terrific. Cases continue to drop, and the acceleration in their deceleration seems to indicate vaccination is already having an effect. The stay-athome order April 16 affected mobility enough that contacts were reduced. The hospitals continue to back away from the ledge.
We may have come closer to system-wide disasters than we realized, and may have merely deferred them. But on behaviour, Ontario may have been scared straight.
“My sense is (the compliance with restrictions) is a lot better than it was six weeks ago, because we have had our provincial leadership switch to pointing out there is significant risk, and people visibly saw how our hospitals got overwhelmed, and were reminded about the seriousness of this,” said Dr. Mustafa Hirji, the medical officer of health for Niagara Region.
“I think this is fragile, though, and it could easily be lost if we don’t handle it well.”
Thursday, the province handled it well enough. Sticking with the stay-at-home, even if the cabinet rejected a fourweek extension, is necessary. Imploring people to consider how badly we distorted our hospitals is necessary, too. The measures, imperfect as they are, are working, and lifting them earlier could unleash a fourth wave. So naturally, when not blaming teachers unions for schools staying virtual, Ford blamed, uh, the border. Again.
“There’s no question, we’re on the right path,” Ford said. “We’re making tremendous progress. But one thing threatens all the progress we’ve made. One thing threatens the summer everyone hopes to have. And that’s the weak and porous border measures that the federal government has kept in place.”
To say this while defending the measures your government actively resisted and undermined for over two months, which are now working despite anything involving the borders, is to eschew even an attempt at coherence.
But then, coherence has never been this government’s strong suit when it comes to pandemic strategy, such as it is. The decline in cases comes in spite of Ontario’s measures, in a way — the playground ban vanished, the police enforcement melted, but indoor workplaces were still barely touched, and many outdoor spaces remain banned. First, we can still cut down the essential businesses list, and more. Summer will come faster, if we do.
“The decrease could be accelerated if we had better restrictions regarding essential workplaces applied, and if we had an efficient paid sick leave,” said Dr. Peter Juni, the scientific director of Ontario’s independent volunteer science table. “What is likely helping quite considerably was this elegant move of Peel and Toronto to close workplaces with five or more cases: that’s really helping to avoid the continued propagation of the infection, but it also puts more responsibility on the workplace because of the consequences.”
Then there’s the great outdoors. The outdoors is not perfectly safe; you should keep distanced, or mask when close. But it’s 20 times safer than indoors, or thereabouts, and people have to be somewhere. Golf, tennis, basketball, pickleball, skateboarding and more remain banned, despite medical opposition, partially because we have a premier who bases pandemic response on anecdotal experience — his buddies who get together to have a few pops after golf, the playgrounds or parks he drives by.
Which makes the story from CTV’s Colin D’Mello about the premier being kept hidden to improve his approval ratings make a little more sense. A premier who defends a playground ban based on a graphic that shows a basic two-out-ofthree scenario — if outdoors, stay distanced, and mask up if not — is not ideal.
Juni said the only mobility specifically tied to risk is transit and region-hopping. After that you need to figure out whether people are going inside or not.
As weather changes, as vaccination continues, we can still do this better, as we enter what the prime minister called a one-dose summer. We could carefully open up outdoor activities, with rules, and make life better faster: Juni suggests strict guidelines on everything from golf (no clubhouse, no change rooms, no indoors, separate cars), to basketball (masks, loose defence), to patios (one household per table, properly spaced), to small business retail (maybe tables and awnings out front, turning sidewalks into street markets the way Toronto’s CaféTO program allowed expanded patios).
Beyond that, open up camping and keep it to households. Let people safely breathe. Hirji thinks getting outside but sticking to your household is a clear and helpful line, and has worries about the public health signal relaxing things could send, which is fair.
“I would start with the premise that we should move slowly,” Hirji said. “Obviously COVID-19 is very high right now, our hospitals and ICUs are pretty full — we just barely missed the point where we would have to start triaging patients and not giving patients the care we need because they would be out of beds. We’re recovering on that front, but we don’t have a lot of room for error right now. So we need to be proceeding really cautiously, I think.”
The counter-argument might be that safer outdoor relaxation will better hold people’s compliance, but it’s a real question.
As Juni noted, anything you change, take a few weeks to monitor what happens. We still need to be careful, without losing what is getting us here.
Can the province thread that needle? Probably not, no. But there was tangible relief when this government did the obvious thing, over a year into a pandemic, and what a low bar to set. Now to raise it, if we could.