Ontario lagging in keeping public safe
Imagine a nurse tending to your wounds while infecting you with COVID-19. You won’t know their vaccination status until it’s too late.
Picture a nursing-home aide serving food to your aging parent with a weakened immune system. And then rendering them bedridden by passing on the virus.
Consider a cop ordering you to stop and handing out a ticket while handing off the Delta variant. While he accuses you of a traffic violation, he disobeys orders to get vaccinated.
Now envision a transit driver summoning your child to the front over a fare dispute. If that unvaccinated driver flouts health protocols while enforcing transit rules, your kid pays a high price to ride the better way in the worst of times.
None of these everyday scenarios requires much imagination over vaccination risks. Even if they are sworn to uphold the law and have pledged to do no harm, rule breakers and outliers will wreak havoc.
That’s why people count on their elected leaders to keep them safe in mid-pandemic — to protect them from the recklessness of other people. Frontline workers — or your own co-workers — who get in your face must get out of the way if they decline to get vaccinated (and refuse to disclose their status).
That’s when governments must step in, as they have in Quebec and B.C., where healthcare workers face deadlines to prove their vaccination status — failing which they face unpaid leave, suspension and dismissal.
Not so in Ontario, which is once again lagging where others are leading on vaccinations.
Thousands of unvaccinated health-care workers in Quebec face suspension if they miss the deadline that was supposed to take effect Friday, but has been delayed by a month. In B.C., long-term-care workers faced a Tuesday deadline to comply.
“We respect their choice, but their choice has consequences,” Quebec’s health minister, Christian Dubé, pointed out.
It is a bitter pill, but it is better than spreading the disease. Yes, those suspensions will cause staff shortages, but the alternative to those disruptions is eruptions of COVID-19 — which adds up to more dead workers (and patients) than would be lost from suspensions.
Now, Ontario is the laggard — neither the leader, nor the enforcer. Premier Doug Ford has done many things right in this pandemic, but he will be remembered, when all is said and done, for what he failed to do.
Ford steadfastly refused to enforce mask mandates in the summer of 2020, fobbing it off on municipalities to do the right thing. And the premier delayed vaccination certification for most of the summer, acquiescing only at the eleventh hour — but certifying without clarifying won’t get us very far.
A customer must show proof of the shot to get into a gym, but the employees need not. In most workplaces, vaccination mandates depend on what management says, not what government specifies.
A notable exception is Rod Phillips, who quit cabinet last Christmas over his Caribbean getaway, but is now redeeming himself as the minister of long-term care who gets it — mandating vaccinations for nursing-home workers. Elsewhere, the contradictions on vaccinations are dragging Ontario down.
Enlightened hospital administrators and police chiefs who have mandated vaccinations are facing pushback and protests from defiant employees and vocal anti-vaxxers. While these workplace leaders stick their necks out, the premier has stuck his head in the sand.
Many (but not all) labour leaders are pandering to the loudest voices of anti-vaxxers, ignoring the majority of union members who have a preeminent right to safety in the workplace (including protection from unvaccinated coworkers). Other more enlightened labour leaders, such as UNIFOR president Jerry Dias, have told the union movement to smarten up and show some guts.
“Unions need to be more honest … It will be deemed legitimate for the employer to demand mandatory vaccinations,” Dias told the Star recently.
“You never listen to the loudest three per cent … Suggesting somehow that a bus driver should not get vaccinated, to me makes no sense.”
Appointed regulators are also failing to enforce the rules. Professional colleges in Ontario that are tasked to ensure ethical conduct by doctors, nurses and pharmacists have shown little leadership.
By contrast, their Quebec regulatory counterparts, egged on by the government, have announced they will suspend the licences of members who fail to get vaccinated. After all, there is a higher onus on health-care workers to comply — not just ethically and professionally but scientifically.
“I have a hard time understanding how there are nurses, with scientific training, who refuse to get vaccinated,” Luc Mathieu, head of Quebec’s nurses’ order, explained to The Canadian Press.
Nineteen months after COVID-19 took root in Canada, the time for vacillation over vaccination is over. Now, no one can justifiably claim they haven’t had the time to get informed or get injected.
Just as any patient deserves a safe space, so too any worker has the right to a safe workplace, and any civilian is entitled to a safe interaction with police. They shouldn’t be dependent on the vagaries of management, the caprices of unions, and the whims of regulators to ensure that potential carriers of COVID-19 are not infecting them in proximity.
That’s the job of government. Just not in Ford’s Ontario.