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home / 世界杯决赛2022

opinion: doug ford delivers more pandemic weirdness

'covid is a hoax' protesters get police escorts, while golf, tennis and baseball get banned outright. it's asking a lot

by healthing.ca

may 18 2021
read time 4 minute read
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on sunday, the ontario government threw hundreds of thousands of parents and children a bone and announced that overnight summer camps would be allowed to operate in the summer of 2021. or rather, that seems to be the substance of what premier doug ford announced , out of the blue, while visiting a vaccination clinic. “we are going to open up very, very soon and i have to say one thing about the summer camps: july 3 is usually the time they open and they’re opening up this year,” he told reporters, apparently extemporizing.

we have no official details of what rules might govern camps, or what strings are attached. but ontario camping association covid-19 taskforce members mark diamond and jack goodman told ctv news they had heard personally from the premier that sleepaway camps were a go — provided “pandemic conditions continue to abate.”

good as the news seems to be, this proviso suggests the government still doesn’t quite understand why it’s doing this. ontario shut down schools province-wide on april 12; they remain closed in the peel regional health unit, which has nearly 400 active cases per 100,000 population; in the hastings and prince edward counties health unit, which has 34; in the chatham-kent health unit, which has 28; and in the algoma health unit, which has 19.
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if the government is that concerned about ontario’s children as disease spreaders, it should be eager to send as many of the little covid bombs away to the country as possible, for as long as possible. it’s certainly a lot safer than day camp, or (heaven forbid) just letting kids make their own fun — though both perfectly safe things are going to get even safer very quickly as vaccination numbers keep increasing.
meanwhile, in canada’s largest city, it’s anyone’s guess when anything will reopen: by the ford government’s standards of inscrutability, the summer camps decision is nothing. many of the same voices have advocated just as strenuously to reopen baseball diamonds, tennis courts, golf courses, skate parks. no luck, and no one really knows why. ford’s attempts at explaining the golf ban only left the province more bewildered than before: “i talk to my buddies. i know what happens. you know, they pick up another buddy, two, or three. they go out, go golfing. and there’s nothing wrong with golfing,” ford told reporters last week. “the problem is the mobility. then after golf, they go back, they have a few pops. that’s the problem. so that’s the issue.”
“go back” … to one of their houses? what does this have to do with golf?
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ontarians have a high tolerance for abiding asinine rules, but some days it seems like we’re part of a psychological experiment designed to discover our breaking point. on saturday, amidst incandescent late-spring weather, torontonians very much looked to have abandoned whatever little attention they were paying ford’s laughable “stay-at-home order.” or they did, until police started clearing out parks at dusk. (one hopes none of them “went back and had a few pops.”)
but the rules are still visible everywhere: you can’t play baseball — the city has literally fenced off the infields; can’t play tennis — the courts are padlocked, the nets removed, or both. (toronto wants us to believe it had no choice but to do this. it is not convincing.) you couldn’t play golf, or even frolf.
what you can do on a saturday in toronto, if the mood strikes you, is attend a flamboyantly illegal protest or march with absolute no fear of being arrested. there were two 5,000-strong demonstrations on saturday, toronto police report: the traditional anti-lockdown march, with its now-traditional police escort; and a protest outside city hall over israel’s response to hamas’s ongoing rocket attacks.
together the demonstrations resulted in a grand total of three charges: one for assault, one for assault on a police officer, and one for possession of a weapon. no one was charged for just being there. that’s probably for the best: why escalate the situation? outdoors is, after all, better than in.

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but it is asking a lot even of any population to have to watch police escort the “covid is a hoax” parade around town on tv every saturday while not being allowed to participate safely in obviously safe outdoor activities, and for no good reason. some days it almost seems like ford is cultivating the sort of fury that’s made jason kenney’s life so miserable in recent months. ironically, though, it’s the ndp who are now reaping the political benefits: on monday, ontario opposition leader andrea horwath forced tory mpps to vote against loosening these asinine restrictions. all those present duly humiliated themselves.
we’ve had more than a year of this, and it’s beyond perplexing. most governments, most premiers, can probably expect a post-pandemic boost — even from the polling doldrums where ford and kenney now find themselves. i’ve struggled to imagine canadians having time to seek accountability when they’re basking in their newly rediscovered freedoms. but ford’s third wave of flip-flops, non-sequiturs and golfing-buddy stories has been so remarkably, uniquely, inexplicably weird, it’s tough to imagine it won’t leave a lasting impression on the electorate — especially because most were once more than willing to give ford the benefit of the doubt: a year ago, léger found 86 per cent of ontarians were satisfied with the pandemic measures ford had put in place; as of léger’s last poll, it was 37 per cent.

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• email: cselley@nationalpost.com | twitter:

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