Chris Selley understands why the internet shaming community is dunking on the apparently large number of people who crowded into Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods park over the weekend but doesn’t feel the need to join them:
Screencap from a CBC report on unorganized social distancing civil disobedience at Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods Park on Saturday.
Human beings need to get outside and socialize. They have breaking points, and many are very understandably at them. (An aside: I can’t help noticing how many people venting fury on social media have also treated their followers to images of their back-patio office setups, or updates on their new vegetable gardens.) There is also no surplus of parkland in downtown Toronto. Photographic evidence suggests other neighbourhood greenspaces were very busy as well, though not to the same extent.
In other words, this was always going to happen. So the time is long past when politicians like Ontario Premier Doug Ford or Toronto Mayor John Tory should be able to cluck their tongues or stamp their feet at such people and expect their constituents to nod along in solidarity.
Jurisdictions facing significant COVID-19 outbreaks had one finite period of time in which to try to knock this bastard virus down. After that period of time, the socioeconomic costs of the shutdown would become unsustainable and the economy would have to reopen. We’re seeing that happen all over the world right now: in essence, countries are rolling the dice. If they did well in the allotted time, fewer people will have to die in the name of getting back to normal.
The federal, Ontario and Toronto governments have not done well — certainly not to any extent that justifies their leaders’ soaring approval ratings.
The feds have been abysmal since even before Day One, with Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam actively downplaying the threat. We shipped 16 tonnes of personal protective equipment to China with no viable plan to replace it. Whatever you think of travel bans as an anti-pandemic measure, the government undermined its own credibility by insisting they don’t work, then changing course 180 degrees over the course of a weekend. Most astonishingly, the feds at first utterly failed to communicate the most basic advice to returning travellers — advice such as “don’t stop for groceries or at the pharmacy on your way home.”
And Tam’s initial ludicrous “masks don’t work” narrative has grudgingly evolved to support the use of non-medical masks “where social distancing is not possible.” But the federal government’s official advice on “safe shopping” — indeed the entire web page titled “COVID-19 and food safety” — still doesn’t mention masks, even as the berth shoppers give each other seems to narrow by the day. This anti-mask stance seems to be ideological, bred in the bone.
