Feeling Abandoned

I am shaken to my core about how much the Ontario government abandoned the people that are doing the right thing. Abandoned the law abiding. Abandoned the people working to end this pandemic.

The abandonment is to the stage that the government and the police are granting a group a license to murder. The appeasement of the anti-health and safety movement is a license to kill. Indirectly and indiscriminately. What they call a “protest” has more profound effects than the disagreement over carbon taxes. These people are literally against health and safety provisions, and therefore they are for the freedom to share a deadly disease with friends, family and strangers.

Those of us that value our own lives, and more importantly, the lives of our fellow citizens, are abandoned.

• We just learned that hospitals were not opposed to vaccination mandates, but yet, the anti-vaxxers were pandered to through policy.
• Our education sector with a history of vaccination mandates, but instead the anti-vaxxers were pandered to.
• Senior citizens are locked up in Long Term Care homes. Again. For over a month now. Basically to pander to the anti-vaxxers.
• Anti-health and safety protests happening everywhere, with associated assaults on businesses and restaurants and the people that work there. Abandoned by law enforcement.

There’s more examples of this than I can think of right now where the needs of the “anti-mandates” are prioritized over the law, and the people it’s supposed to protect. As many have said over and over again “we’re on our own.” The government abandoned us to decide our own safety for ourselves. But limits the tools available to us to achieve that. We were set adrift in shit creek without a paddle and told that was all that could be done.

A friend told me, that:

Something… Chris Hayes, maybe? said more than a decade ago that has haunted me for YEARS: think about a sort of middle-American conservative white guy in the rust belt, you can sort of imagine a guy who approves of the military, maybe served, voted Republican for Reagan and George W. Bush but wasn’t a loony about it, and is religious in the “attends Church on Sundays” sense but isn’t out to convert his neighbours.

This guy (says Hayes) of whom there are millions, has watched basically every important institution in his life fail over his adulthood — the military got sucked into Iraq and Afghanistan, the Catholic Church is a cesspit of child abuse, if his job even had a union it’s a shell of its former self, and by 2008 the GOP had spent a generation cheerleading for exactly the economic forces that absolutely destroyed people’s livelihoods in the Great Recession. And that’s assuming our model guy didn’t personally lose his job or his house, which he very well might have.

And the progressive response has been totally inadequate — here I’m defining progressive as “Barack Obama and further left”, because I think the failure has to be diagnosed broadly. Because while there’s been efforts to try and do important things on economic insecurity — Obamacare in the US, but also things like the Child Tax Credit federally in Canada or Wynne’s UBI pilot in Ontario — there’s a lot of emphasis on short-term political accomplishments (people need to get re-elected!) and less on the longer-term goal of winning the argument for broader institutional changes.

One thread I see running through all of it is simply that we haven’t built institutions that really have an effective capacity to respond to the jobs we’ve given them. On the public health front, the Liberals spent the decade after the recession cutting budgets everywhere they could to try and balance the budget, including in public health (memorably, letting the post-SARS PPE stockpile expire.) And then when Ford took over the PC Party had been so marinated in Toronto Sun columns decrying Toronto Public Health’s alleged mission creep that the big fight they decided to pick in the 2019 budget was cutting public health funds. Absolute madness driven by nothing except the internal politics of the conservative movement.

I absolutely agree with all of that. But there is even a reluctance to use the tools we still available. Having fewer options than we should and having no options at all aren’t quite equivalent. (To wit, vaccination mandates are still an option.) We’re facing the twin problem of constrained resources and ideological abandonment. One is easier to solve than the other.

The ideological abandonment is what frightens me most, what has shaken my faith in government and justice. A simple example is the debate over vaccination mandates.

• Having a mandate for schools gives parents, students and staff faith, comfort and a sense of security that the environment is safe.
• Having a mandate for workplaces does the same.
• For restaurants, it would remove that doubt and certainty that the person serving me is vaccinated or not.

Vaccination mandates are a way for government and the people to have faith in each other. That by following them, we avoid the harsher measures of lockdowns and closures. That by instituting them, the government is using the tools at its disposal. Faith in Good Government. Order in society.

We know what works, and the government refuses to use even what we have. And that feeds the sense of abandonment. Perpetuating the cycle of anger and fatigue. We’re living where the over-arching policy appears to be, as Aaron Wherry put it, “the notion that freedom should come before fear [and] that individualism should matter more than public health.” And it is happening despite the clear wishes of the majority of people. In a supposedly democratic society. The angry minority is being pandered to, at a risk to the collective health of everyone. This is more key to me than the historic underfunding problem, as much as the underfunding is a problem. But if government doesn’t believe in the purpose of government, funding won’t change that. Maybe it’s impossible to separate the two problems, but one is fundamental to changing the other. And that this viewpoint is shared by the unelected police departments there to enforce the laws we do have puts the extra emphasis on that problem. The American idealism of “Live Free or Die” has corrupted the Canadian version of “Peace, Order and Good Government.” From government on through to the unaccountable arms of justice. The current crises in Ottawa also reflects this. I don’t believe the only two options for the police are “do nothing” and “violent suppression.” There’s a choice made to abandon the people of Ottawa enduring this situation. If the only tool police have for situations like Ottawa is violent suppression, then there is a larger issue.

Good government feeds the cycle of voter interest, the “median voter” support. So again, it isn’t about what we don’t have, that we should have. It’s about what we do have, but do not use. The “use every tool in the toolbox” crap that we hear but we know is not happening.

I think of the ‘Denmark is removing all restrictions’ thread on Twitter. The key part there was the faith in government, and the corresponding faith in people. It’s a culture that developed, a culture I largely thought we shared, and that was a naïve thought here on my end. As I have to keep reminding myself, the governments and cultures on our East Coast did better than we did, with most of the same tools and constraints. That might be unravelling a bit today in New Brunswick, but it held for most of the two years. In Canada we have examples where this feeling of abandonment/mutual trust is unevenly distributed. From East to West. The eastern provinces are an important point to this as they share the same laws, finances and constraints as the rest of us. But their culture, including government and society, is a stark contrast to the provinces from Ontario to Alberta.

There’s a strange irony to all of this. The anti-health and safety occupiers want their freedoms back. When you are abandoned by those that are supposed to keep you safe, you have the ultimate in freedom. It just doesn’t feel all that liberating. I have been freed of my trust in government and police. I have been freed of my trust in my neighbour, and society at large. And this freedom does not leave me feeling contented. I feel isolated in my freedom. Cut off. Adrift.

Abandoned.