Dark Days in Canada
A once tolerant society has found a minority group to pick on: the unvaccinated
Until recently Canada was one of the world’s most tolerant countries in the world. Acceptance of the “other” was something of a cultural attribute central to the national identity, and Canadian society would typically go out of its way to accommodate just about any request by a minority group to avoid offending sensibilities, no matter how outlandish the request and how small the group. Sometimes the accommodation would verge on the caricatural, at other times on the excessive; but at the heart of it lay the noble idea that all people ought to be treated equitably and no one should be oppressed or excluded.
There is nothing like a crisis to test the solidity of one’s moral compass and, given Canada’s growing willingness to treat the unvaccinated segment of its population as second-class citizens, Canada’s compass seems to be malfunctioning. To be fair, Canada is not the only Western nation to attack the unvaccinated. Italy has made Covid vaccination mandatory for anyone over the age of 50, Austria has made Covid vaccination mandatory for all (following a brief but no less controversial lockdown of the unvaccinated), and the French president has announced that harassing the unvaccinated will be a cornerstone of his electoral strategy. But then, when it comes to historical baggage, Canada has tended to travel light. While it has its skeletons, like any country, the comparative weightlessness of its past has always been part of what made life in Canada so appealing.
Sadly, this is now changing. Canadian society has all but declared war on some 7 million of its citizens — 7 million being the estimated number of eligible Canadians who have said no to a Covid vaccine. If you think this is hyperbole, consider the facts. The unvaccinated are barred from just about all methods of conveyance involving long-distance travel, which means that, absent access to a private aircraft or a loophole of some sort, unvaccinated individuals are unable to leave the country — an Iron Curtain of sorts, only one along biopolitical lines. Over the last couple of months, unvaccinated public sector employees have been turfed out of their jobs at all levels of the government — and, to add insult to injury, they are deemed ineligible for unemployment benefits. An increasing number of private sector employers are also asking for proof of vaccination as a condition of employment, and it feels like it’s just a matter of time before provincial legislation forces them to do so.
In Quebec, the unvaccinated are unable to enter liquor stores, and the province has announced it will be imposing a special tax on those who haven’t gotten the jab. The province of New Brunswick originally flirted with the idea of allowing grocery stores to ask for proof of vaccination, a proposal that has since been shelved — for the time being, that is. Last week, Canada’s health minister mused that mandatory vaccination might be coming to a province near you. Welcome to Canada’s “new normal.”
The usual shibboleths are advanced to justify this creation of a two-tier society. There is the argument that the unvaccinated are a threat to others. This is a blatant falsehood. The Covid vaccines are non-sterilizing vaccines, and the vaccinated can spread the virus just like the unvaccinated; “the science” is pretty clear on that point. A yearlong study published last fall in The Lancet, for example, showed the fully vaccinated are almost just as likely to spread the Delta variant to other household members as those who are unvaccinated. Given the travel restrictions on those who haven’t had the shot, the Omicron variant was also likely brought into Canada by vaccinated travellers.
The argument that the unvaccinated are a danger to others is so obviously flawed that officials have adjusted the “narrative” to fall back on another argument, i.e., that the unvaccinated are a burden on the health care system. According to this analysis, the unvaccinated flood the hospitals, tax resources, and create the need for more restrictions to keep the health care system from collapsing, thus preventing a return to normal life. Really? Let’s take a look at Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. At the time of writing, according to the government’s own numbers, there are 2,650 people in Ontario’s hospitals with COVID-19. Of that number, 1,813 are fully vaccinated, 163 are partially vaccinated, and 674 are unvaccinated. Looking at the ICU numbers, of the 343 patients currently taking up ICU space due to COVID-19, 167 are fully vaccinated, 19 are partially vaccinated, and 157 are unvaccinated.
While the number of unvaccinated people in Ontario’s hospitals clearly appears to be disproportionate to the number they represent as a percentage of the population, the argument that the unvaccinated are overwhelming the health care system when they make up 25% of all Covid hospitalizations and 45% of ICU Covid hospitalizations lacks any nuance. Officials have had almost two years to improve ICU capacity; they are now blaming their administrative incompetence on 100–200 unvaccinated individuals, who are somehow able to paralyze a province with a population of 15 million people — a situation that is more of a reflection on Ontario’s crumbling health care system than on those who are being blamed for threatening it.
None of this seems to matter — and that’s because it doesn’t matter. The real problem with the unvaccinated is that they haven’t done the “right thing.” More than anything, it is a moral failing that they are accused of, confirming what many of us have thought for a while — that the Covid crisis is not about public health. In a September video clip that has recently surfaced online, Justin Trudeau — whose honorific as Canada’s prime minister is the “Right Honourable,” but who is neither one of these things — links the unvaccinated to racists and misogynists, and asks if the society should tolerate them. Trudeau, for whom the unvaccinated are just another “basket of deplorables,” to use Clintonese, belongs to that category of self-righteous cynics who need to frame every important debate in moral terms, which automatically turns every person unlucky enough to end up on the “wrong” side of the debate into an inherently bad person.
In practical terms, this means that Trudeau oversees the change in the wording of the national anthem (from “True patriot love in all thy sons command” to “True patriot love in all of us command”) to satisfy fashionable notions of gender inclusivity and please a small number of radicals who see vestiges of patriarchy everywhere, but refuses to “tolerate” 7 million Canadians, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding citizens who believe, with reason, that their bodies fall outside the purview of the government, that their rights should not be contingent on their health status, and that they should not submit to an intrusive medical procedure that was only recently introduced on the market.
The trouble is that much of Canadian society agrees with him. The main institutions are certainly on board. As the national leader has demonized millions of Canadians, the political opposition has been MIA; the leaders of the main opposition parties at the federal level have had nothing to say. The justice system seems to be asleep at the wheel. As for much of the media — whose traditional role, at least in theory, is to question the powerful, prevent government overreach, and promote justice — it has helped foment an environment that is becoming ever more hostile to those it casually labels as “anti-vaxxers.”
To use but an example, the present editorial mission of the Toronto Star, one of Canada’s leading newspapers, seems to be hounding the unvaccinated and blaming them for every problem under the sun. “The majority of people,” a recent hit piece by that newspaper’s Editorial Board concludes, “who ‘did the right thing’ and got vaccinated are effectively being held hostage to the selfishness of the few. At this point it’s entirely reasonable to raise the price of irresponsibility, and make life more difficult for those who won’t get their shots. Ontario and other provinces should follow Quebec’s example and turn the screws further on the unvaxxed.”
Turn the screws further — für ihre Sicherheit!
There are exceptions. The Toronto Sun, for example, has published a laudable article strongly condemning the lack of political opposition to the scapegoating of the unvaccinated. Regrettably, these lone voices of dissent have no sway over those who, by dint of being in a position of authority, shape policy and public opinion, nor do they reflect public sentiment. A far more commonplace view, it seems, is the one expressed in this article by the LA Times, whose author ponders the legitimacy of schadenfreude that one might experience over the deaths of prominent opponents of Covid vaccine mandates. Little wonder that so many people have given up on the media; the fourth estate has completely discredited itself.
Perhaps the current situation in Canada, however disturbing, ought not to be surprising. In recent years, the most fanatical apostles of tolerance have shown that they are unwilling to extend their tolerance to those who do not share their views. As I’ve attempted to explain elsewhere, there is a clear link between “wokeism” — the prevailing ideology of tolerance in many Western countries — and enthusiasm for pandemic-related restrictions.
What is surprising is that the present demonization of a substantial minority group on the part of government officials has taken place alongside a program of reconciliation with the Native population, a group that has suffered grievously as a consequence of European colonial adventures. Prompted by the discovery of unmarked graves belonging to Native children at residential schools last year, reconciliation became one of the key topics in the weeks before the snap election in September of 2021.
This is rich in irony. Atoning for historical injustices committed against one part of the population while encouraging present injustices against another suggests that the lessons of history have been lost — on Trudeau as well as on those who toe his line. Yet one ignores the lessons bestowed by history at one’s own peril. As experience has shown time and again, using groups of people as scapegoats never works out well in the long run, and it is unlikely that the ongoing witch hunt against the unvaccinated will be an exception.
