furey: canada still needs inquiries, commissions, into our covid response
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it’s nice to not have to think about covid-19 all the time these days. people don’t really talk about it much anymore.
the anticipated hostility between the masked and unmasked never materialized. it was all a social media creation. people have been easygoing and respectful of each other’s choices. as for the division of society into places that do and don’t require voluntary vaccine passports, that never really happened either.
nowadays, the news that a neighbour or friend has come down with the once feared virus elicits a shrug or some joke about “welcome to the club.” for most people, their family covid story is an uneventful nothing-burger.
given all of this, the idea of totally ghosting away from covid is appealing. whatever your perspective, whatever your experience, the past two years have been exhausting. for some, it’s even been traumatizing. it would be nice to think we can just be done with it all and put it behind us.
but we can’t.
we can’t forget that there were some truly crazy things that went down. like how public health officials told parents that if their small children were deemed close contacts of someone who later tested positive for the virus the kid needed to be kept in a separate room away from family for 14 days. or how there were retirement home residents who opted for assisted suicide rather than endure more lockdowns. absolute atrocities that should have never happened. the list goes on.
and those are just the government edicts. there’s also the broader social effects. the pressure cooker mindset that, due to the frenzied news coverage and social media tone, engulfed so many people led to tragic splits within families and among friends when perspectives on covid diverged. hopefully time has begun to heal those wounds.
yes, the virus was and remains quite serious for some high-risk categories. but did we really need to have security remove the one guy who just didn’t want to wear a mask at the grocery store? was there really a good reason to fire an employee — who was working from home anyway! — because, for whatever reason, the person didn’t want to receive a vaccine? looking back on it now, surely many people have come around to see that a lot of what happened was overkill.
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yet to date there haven’t been any formal inquiries or investigations announced by any level of government in canada to probe our virus response, even though we routinely convene such things for events of lesser importance.
it makes sense that there isn’t the political will for it. there haven’t been any major changeovers of government in the past two years, so a politician would basically need to announce that they’re investigating themselves.
don’t expect, say, ontario premier doug ford to investigate why it is he failed to fulfil his early pledge to create an “iron ring of protection” around long-term care facilities or why his government thought it was a good idea to ask the cops to conduct random stops of motorists in the spring of 2021.
we still need to push for these investigations though. why was it that, in ontario, the entire province supposedly needed to be shut down once the covid icu occupancy number, including incidental admissions, hit 300? what sort of mickey mouse jurisdiction operates that way? what exactly were all the very well-paid senior health bureaucrats doing?
these are the sorts of matters that still need to be aired out. a total systems failure is not something you can just shrug off after the fact.
we’re approaching the all too short canadian summer and, then, hopefully our first normal fall in a couple of years. it would be nice to just get on with our lives. besides, the best revenge is living well.
but there remain wrongs that must be made right. there are questions to be answered about mistakes that were made. canadians still deserve accountability.
check out the postmedia podcast full comment with anthony furey — where you’ll find engaging feature conversations with interesting canadians, including recent episodes with conservative leadership candidates pierre poilievre, leslyn lewis and roman baber.
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