You Cannot Solve Systemic Problems Through Regulating Leisure Activities: Thoughts on Ontario’s 3rd Wave by Darryl Newbury

“I remember my chief science adviser bringing me a graph that showed me what flattening the curve would look like for New Zealand. And where our hospital and health capacity was. And the curve wasn’t sitting under that line. So we knew that flattening the curve wasn’t sufficient for us.” - Jacinta Ardern quoted in The Guardian (Dec. 16, 2020)

In stark contrast to the covid-elimintation approach of  New Zealand, here in Ontario we have and have had a policy that can be summed up as offering little more than “Thoughts and Prayers.” Ontario has fundamentally no policy or plan to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 in any way meaningful. 

Let's start with some grim statistics. 20% of all Covid deaths in Ontario amongst those who are under 40 years have died in the last month.  Let that sink in. There has also been a disproportionate number of Covid deaths in the 40-60 age group in the past month. It is important to recognize this timeline because on February 11th, Dr. Adalsteinn Brown, the co-chair of Ontario’s COVID-19 science advisory table warned that we were headed for catastrophe stating “There will be little time to react quickly because of how fast the variants spread. We are operating with uncertainty. That is the nature of a new disease with new variants. We need to do as much as we can to reduce that uncertainty.” (CTV News, February 11, 2021) . Yet despite that, almost two months later Ontario Solicitor General Sylvie Jones essentially told CBC that they had to see if the projections were right (CBC Metro Morning, April 7, 2021) In fact, in the interim, the Ford government chose instead to “reopen” the economy into his colour coded system before bringing us into our “lite versions” of emergency breaks, shutdowns and lockdown. Ontario did not go into the third wave blindly, it went into it with a Premier whose eyes were caught in the headlights of an inevitably worsening pandemic.  Quite simply Ford had the information and willfully chose to ignore it.  Many of the third wave deaths were entirely avoidable if only the Ford government had chosen to listen to science.
Now, that catastrophe is here.  One only needs to listen to the despair in the voices of physicians like Michael Warner at Michael Garron hospital or Dr Adalsteinn Brown who say “Our  hospitals can no longer function normally, they are bursting at their seams.” (CNN, April 16, 2021) Yet Premier Ford’s response was not to close down non-essential "essential" workplaces or introduce paid sick days. Instead, he decided that we need more policing and need to close down disc golf, pickle ball and all forms of outdoor play.   Systemic causes of death and suffering cannot be solved through policies which are limited to being aimed at regulating our leisure activities.
The Covid-19 Pandemic in Ontario has largely been manmade and is the result of a succession of Doug Ford driven policies that placed profit above people. Our pandemic has been disproportionately experienced by a racialized and precarious segment of the workforce and their families, first in the long-term care sector, and more recently in retail, warehouses, construction and food processing.   I hazard to guess that we'd all be hard pressed to identify a single outbreak caused by pickleball or a superspreading event on a disc golf course.  On this point, it is worth noting that a study out of Ireland showed that just 0.1% of all spread can be attributed to outdoor activities (half of which was directly connected to construction sites. (Irish Times April 5, 2021) 
What it comes down to is that Premier Ford has entirely failed Ontario. He is keeping non-essential "essential" construction open simply because corporate greed is more important than human lives (especially if those humans are racialized, precarious workers). And all he offers, in his April 16th press conference, as a solution is more policing and the punishing of the citizens of Ontario in the way of prohibitions on various outdoor activities due to the fact that his policies have been nothing short of a very deadly and abysmal failure. 
Essentially, our pandemic and its associated suffering and death, could have been largely avoided with a shorter and more meaningful lockdown and with targeted closing of high risk workplaces and providing paid sick days for all. When he rushes to reopen schools and uses children's mental health as his pretext, and he will, remember how much concern he had for their mental health when he tried to close down outdoor playgrounds. A pushback from the people of Ontario may have led to Ford backtracking on the plan to close children's playgrounds and even on the draconian attack on our civil liberties through increased police powers.  We need to continue that pushback until all workers have paid sick days so that the precarious and racialized workers in Ontario will never again have to decide between showing up at work sick or being evicted because they cannot pay the rent. Ontario could have chosen a real Covid elimination policy like in Jacinta Ardern’s New Zealand, but instead has chosen corporate greed over the lives of racialized workers. For that, Premier Ford,  without doubt, is guilty of criminal negligence causing death. 

 Darryl Newbury is high school history teacher and union activist working in York Region. He currently serves as OSSTF D16 Vice President.