What took Ford so long on vaccines?
The sudden clamour for vaccination mandates is wondrous to behold.
The wonder is that it took so long to take hold.
Most people wanted to avoid the risk of getting an infection. Yet politicians were averse to the risk of public divisions, afraid to go out on a limb lest they be pilloried by anti-vaxxers.
In the politics of pandemics, people are looking for leaders, not laggards.
This month — 17 months after COVID-19 took root in Canada — our prime minister, premier and mayor have finally found their voices on vaccination mandates. Belatedly, reluctantly, they have said what needed to be said to get the jab done.
With an election getting underway, Justin Trudeau mandated vaccinations for air and rail travel, also requiring those in federal government jobs to get jabs — not least Liberal candidates looking for work on Parliament Hill.
At Queen’s Park, Doug Ford finally saw his way to cracking down on health-care workers who were falling through the cracks, while ordering all 64,000 civil servants to get vaccinated — including his own Progressive Conservative MPPs and future candidates.
At city hall, John Tory is now practising what he’s been preaching — finally demanding that municipal employees do what he’s been asking his federal and provincial counterparts to do. Now the big banks and insurance companies, after much hemming and hawing, have hedged their risks by demanding vaccinations for their sprawling bureaucracies.
In ordinary times, necessity is the mother of invention. But in the extraordinary times of COVID-19, necessity demands medical intervention — and inoculation.
Vaccinations have been saving lives for hundreds of years, they have been settled law for a century, and they have been a prerequisite for generations of schoolchildren (but for special exemptions). The only logical argument for delaying the mandating of vaccines was the lag in delivering them.
Now, that time is past. With schools set to resume and the summer respite waning, there is no alternative way to stop the spread of an infectious disease.
This is not compulsion, merely regulation: Absent the jab, you must remain absent from the job — or at least keep away from a safe workplace lest it turn into a toxic environment for workers with the right to health and safety.
But beyond regulation, it is also about education. It is in the nature of nudges and behavioural economics that when people are given an incentive or disincentive by governments, they will govern their actions accordingly.
When French President Emmanuel Macron mandated vaccinations, millions of people across France lined up to get the vaccine. When Quebec Premier François Legault imposed new vaccine requirements, Quebecers fell into line.
Once the U.S. imposes a vaccine requirement as a condition of entry, expect hordes of Canadian anti-vaxxers to suddenly comply so they can satisfy the impulse to visit Florida, Arizona or Las Vegas. When it comes to cross-border pilgrimages, principled paranoia only goes so far.
Political hypocrisy, however, still goes a long way among rival leaders. Few can resist driving political wedges that expose contradictions and divisions on inoculation.
Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath pounced on her Liberal rival, Steven Del Duca, for daring to demand vaccination mandates this month (under fire from her own party, she later recanted). Trudeau’s federal Liberals contrasted their own party policy of compulsory candidate vaccination with that of Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, who left it optional for his own team (The NDP’s Jagmeet Singh has made it mandatory).
In truth, O’Toole’s Tories were unintentionally undermined by their provincial counterparts in Ontario: Ford’s decision this week to expel an errant MPP from his caucus for refusing to get the shot offered an awkward contrast between right and right wing — the premier wedging O’Toole more embarrassingly than Trudeau’s Liberals could have.
While politicians in power have walked a fine line, others have unexpectedly picked up the slack.
David Agnew is now president of Seneca College, but he once served as cabinet secretary at Queen’s Park. Steve Orsini now heads the Council of Ontario Universities, but he too held the job of Ontario’s top public servant.
It is instructive that both have been so instrumental in demanding action: Orsini by exhorting Ford on behalf of Ontario’s universities this month, Agnew by closing off his campus to the unvaccinated.
Seneca was the first postsecondary institution to require vaccination for students and faculty on campus this summer. What made Agnew roll up his sleeves and take aim at those who won’t?
He reminded me that after running the machinery of a provincial government, he took over UNICEF Canada — a global role that brought him face to face with the life-saving power of vaccines, especially the fight against polio and the pushback from anti-vaxxers around the world. What he learned overseas hit home in Ontario:
“I object to people putting pseudo-science in the way of real science, or treating this as a sterile debate about rights versus the people around the world who are dying or disfigured,” Agnew told me.
That two former bureaucrats had to prod the politicians into action shows just how lumbering our leaders have become in mid-pandemic. That the private sector is lagging behind the public service in securing our workplaces is a sad sign of timidity in an emergency.
Mandatory inoculations are our best shot at keeping the virus at bay, allowing us to one day breathe easier as a free society — free from lockdowns. After 17 months, it is time we all found our voices on vaccines — not just soft-spoken former civil servants.