Categories for Feature

Armed police officers stopping people who were doing nothing wrong, and turning them away. 

It’s happened a lot, during this pandemic. It’s happened in Canada, too. 

For weeks, for example, Quebec’s government put police on bridges leading from Ontario into Quebec. Thousands of people were stopped. Most got through, but thousands were turned back. 

For weeks, Gatineau Police set up “random roadside checkpoints” at the Alexandra Bridge, Portage Bridge, Chaudieres Bridge, Champlain Bridge, and Masson-Angers Ferry. The feared Surete du Quebec, meanwhile, was responsible for the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge. 

There were objections, although not from the federal government; there was a petition, but it gathered few signatures. Quebec only signaled its intention to abandon the “checkpoints” by the end of this, the Victoria Day long weekend. 

Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson said: “I’m glad the Quebec Government has finally announced its decision to open up the border between Ottawa and Gatineau.”

He added: “I still don’t understand what was accomplished, but I am pleased that residents on both sides of the river can pass by freely.”

Nobody else really understood either. Why did Quebec’s government order the border patrols? Was it because they sometimes enjoy enraging the rest of Canada (because they do)? Was it because they are nativists and nationalists (because they are)? Was it because Quebec has achieved the distinction of being the seventh-worst place in the world for virus-related deaths (because it has)?

Who knows. It wasn’t saying. Besides, Quebec wasn’t the only government setting up armed blockades within Canada. New Brunswick did it, and so did Prince Edward Island.

In New Brunswick, for weeks, “provincial enforcement officers” were stationed at seven different road crossings, and two airports. Their task: turn back – forcibly, if need be –  anyone they deemed to be “traveling for non-essential reasons.” Canadians from Quebec, PEI and Nova Scotia were routinely refused entry to New Brunswick.

Over and over, motorists trying to enter the province had their licences checked and licence plates recorded – and they were grilled about where they’d been and where they were going. New Brunswick residents were being stopped and questioned, too.

Prince Edward Island, being an island, had an easier time of it.
There, highways staff – not police – were given authority by the provincial government to stop anyone crossing the Confederation Bridge.  The Confederation Bridge, a 13-kilometre fixed link between New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, was built and paid for by Canada.

“Don’t come if it’s not essential,” sniffed PEI’s Minster of Transportation.  “You are going to be turned away.”

And turned away they were. Case in point: Barry Humberstone, a 60-year-old land-owning PEI resident, had the wrong address on his driver’s licence. They wouldn’t let him across. He was sent away, even though he had nowhere to go.

Just as they did with the “checkpoints” on bridges leading into Quebec, the federal government said nothing about what PEI was doing. Zero.

There can be a debate about whether these measures – PEI quaintly, and appropriately, called theirs “Operation Isolation” – helped prevent the spread of the virus. In Quebec’s case, that seems highly doubtful. But it will be debated, at some distant point, in a Royal Commission or an inquiry. Or something.

But what about this question: were the actions of Quebec and New Brunswick and PEI actually legal? What about that?

Because, on a plain reading of Canada’s Constitution – which is, you know, our supreme statute – the blockades were completely illegal.

Section six of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is about mobility rights. Here is what it says: “Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada.”

How important is that section? This important: section 33, the so-called notwithstanding clause – which governments like Quebec’s have routinely invoked to gut essential freedoms – does not even apply to it. It was seen by the framers of our Constitution as that critical: governments aren’t allowed to opt out of it – pandemic or no pandemic.

Sure: section one of the Charter permits courts to determine whether an unconstitutional measure is “reasonable.” But Quebec, New Brunswick and PEI didn’t even bother to make a quick reference application before a court to determine if they were in fact acting legally.  They just went ahead and set up blockades, some of them maintained by police officers carrying guns.

Many, I suspect, won’t care. Better safe than sorry, they’ll say. Better to lose some freedoms than lose one’s life.

And all that is perhaps true. But this is also true: constitutions are designed to guide us through bad times, not good times. They are designed to be the law of the land.  They are designed to remind us who we are, as a people.

During the Great Pandemic of 2020, in some parts of Canada, we needed to be reminded.

Comments (41)

Comments (5)

It is a sunny day in August 1986, and the interview with Canada’s High Aryan Warrior Priest is wrapping up.

His name is Terry Long. At the kitchen table on his acreage outside Caroline, Alberta, he looks like any other farmer. But he’s not.

Long has just spent several hours telling me how blacks are mud people, and how Jews are the literal spawn of Satan, and how Jesus Christ was not a Jew.

The interview over, and safely taped, I demur.

“Sorry, Mr. Long, but Jesus was a Jewish rabbi at all relevant times,” I say.

Long gets up and retrieves a book from his living room. He hands it to me. “It’s our bible,” he says. “The Christian Identity bible. Jesus wasn’t a Jew.” He taps the cover. “It’s right in there.”

The Calgary Herald photographer assigned to the story was Larry MacDougal. Larry drove us back to the newsroom while I marvelled.

“Jesus isn’t a Jew anymore, just like that,” I said to him, snapping my fingers. “Print up your own bible, and make him into a sword-swinging Christian warrior.”

Which the “Aryans” did.

I was reminded of that long-ago encounter, this week, when I posted the number of deaths caused by the coronavirus in the United States – on the day in question, around 72,000 (by the time you read this, it is much more than 80,000). The number came from the Johns Hopkins CSSE.

A women immediately responded. “It’s a hoax,” she tweeted.

I was stunned, a bit. I blocked her. Others – Donald Trump fans – also started to claim, directly or by innuendo, that the Johns Hopkins figure was a hoax.

Like, you know, Terry Long and Jim Keegstra and Ernst Zundel used to say the Holocaust was: a hoax. And, if you didn’t believe it, they had their own historical reference books to prove it. Just like they had their own bibles.

Before the virus started to kill off thousands of us, Donald Trump literally said it was “a hoax,” too, conjured up by his political enemies. Fret not: it would disappear “like a miracle,” he said. It would be gone by Spring, he said, when it was warmer.

When all that turned out to be a lie, Trump said malarial drugs would cure it. When that was shown to be a lie, too, he mused about injecting people with disinfectants, or bathing the insides of their bodies with light.

Nobody needed to say any of that was a lie, however. Even Trump’s most ardent followers wouldn’t agree to inject bleach in themselves.

Joe Biden didn’t help matters, either. Despite being isolated in his basement TV studio in Delaware, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was wiping the floor with Donald Trump. Ten points ahead in every battleground state, without having to shake a single hand.

Donald Trump was losing, big time. So, what did Donald Trump do?

He did the only thing he had left: he embraced the Terry Long strategy. Like Zundel and Keegstra and all the historical revisionist Hitler freaks do, Trump’s winged monkeys simply commenced bleating that the coronavirus death toll – a death toll made inarguably worse by their hero – was a hoax.

A hoax.

Scott Jensen, a Trump loyalist and Republican state senator in Minnesota, stated that Corvid-19 numbers were being diabolically inflated by Trump’s enemies. Soon enough, Fox’s Laura Ingraham and Infowars started repeating Jensen’s false claim.  Qanon came next, asserting that a fake death toll was designed to cause “mass hysteria” in an election year.

Donald Trump, the Troll-in-Chief, promptly picked up the revisionist refrain.  Trump retweeted those who claimed that Trump’s enemies were inflating the death toll to “steal the election.”  

And now, of course, pandemic truthers are everywhere.  It’s a “plandemic” and a “hoax.”

Do the Corvid-deniers represent a real threat? Could they get away with such an evil lie?

Terry Long, with his hand on his very own bible, would likely say they could.

 

 

Comments (9)

Comments (1)

After Nova Scotia, Justin Trudeau really didn’t have much choice.

It was the worst mass-murder in Canadian history.  Offering thoughts and prayers, as he had often noted, just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

Besides: in the 2019 election that returned him to power, Trudeau had unambiguously promised to ban weapons like the AR-15 rifle, which the Liberal Party said was “specifically designed to inflict mass human casualties.” 

There’d be a buyback program for assault-style weapons that had been legally purchased, Trudeau said in Toronto’s Greektown in September, and there’d be a two-year amnesty while the program was being set up.

Canadians then trooped to the polls in October, and gave Trudeau more seats in the Commons than his nearest rival.  They voted for his gun control plan.  So, now he’s going to implement it.

It won’t be easy.  For starters, Trudeau isn’t taking his changes to Parliament – he’s implementing them via Order-in-Council: a cabinet vote.  No public debate.

Doing so in the middle of the pandemic, too, provides more fodder for Trudeau’s critics: they’ll say he’s using a massive crisis as political cover.  They might not be wrong about that.

History provides a cautionary tale, too.  Two decades ago, this writer was an assistant to Jean Chretien – and, later, one of his candidates – when the Liberal Party made its last serious attempt to legislate gun control.  

We mostly failed, for ten reasons.

Mistake #1: Our lead proponent was Allan Rock, a downtown Toronto lawyer who literally embodied the constituency we already had, not the constituency we needed.

Mistake #2: We let conservatives frame the narrative – we kept trying to argue the issue on their terms, and not ours. Most days, we were astonished that we even needed to make the case for gun control.

Mistake #3: We underestimated the degree to which the other side would (a) organize themselves and (b) fundraise and recruit off the issue. We also underestimated how sophisticated they were at networking – even pre-Internet.

Mistake #4: We had rural and Indigenous members in caucus and within the party – and we simply assumed they’d all fall in line. They didn’t.

Mistake #5: We weren’t specific enough. We let the proposed changes be defined by the opposition before we could define them ourselves.

Mistake #6: We assumed the constituencies who most favoured gun control – women, Quebeckers, young people – would automatically rally to our side. They didn’t. They, like all constituencies, have a myriad number of issues which motivate them. Not one.

Mistake #7: We made gun control a loyalty test. By vilifying/shunning Liberals who opposed the proposals, however, we made it easier for them to step outside the tent and organize – or vote Conservative.

Mistake #8: We didn’t move fast enough. In the US, in places like Connecticut, they were successful in making changes because they acted right after atrocities like Sandy Hook, when memories were fresh.

Mistake #9: We thought we were making the case for a country that would never become like the United States. And we discounted the possibility that most Canadians (correctly) knew that we would never, ever become as bad as the United States.

Mistake #10: We were Liberals. We got cocky. We got arrogant. We assumed we knew the country best. We didn’t.

 

Will Justin Trudeau’s gun control meet the same fate? Will he learn from our long-ago mistakes?

 

We shall see.  Unlike us, he has moved swiftly, and made his announcement just days after the Nova Scotia massacre.  He’s clearly trying to frame the narrative, and he isn’t waiting for key demographics to ride to his rescue. He’s acting fast, while public opinion is still on his side.

 

But those who oppose gun control seem to be far more organized, now (although doing so during the coronavirus lockdown will present a challenge for them).  And Trudeau has handed a ready-made issue to his Conservative opponents, in the middle of their leadership race.

 

So, will Justin Trudeau prevail, in the way that we did not?  Time will tell.

 

But after Nova Scotia, and after his election promise, he had no choice.  

 

He had to act, and he did.

 

Comments (43)

Comments (0)

The New York Times‘ Frank Bruni is the writer I’ll never be. Here, in its entirety, is his column in today’s paper, about the woman above, the one who foresaw it all – and what she foresees next.

Don’t expect to feel very hopeful by the end.

I told Laurie Garrett that she might as well change her name to Cassandra. Everyone is calling her that anyway.

She and I were Zooming — that’s a verb now, right? — and she pulled out a 2017 book, “Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes.” It notes that Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, was prescient not only about the impact of H.I.V. but also about the emergence and global spread of more contagious pathogens.

“I’m a double Cassandra,” Garrett said.

She’s also prominently mentioned in a recent Vanity Fair article by David Ewing Duncan about “the Coronavirus Cassandras.”

Cassandra, of course, was the Greek prophetess doomed to issue unheeded warnings. What Garrett has been warning most direly about — in her 1994 best seller, “The Coming Plague,” and in subsequent books and speeches, including TED Talks — is a pandemic like the current one.

She saw it coming. So a big part of what I wanted to ask her about was what she sees coming next. Steady yourself. Her crystal ball is dark.

Despite the stock market’s swoon for it, remdesivir probably isn’t our ticket out, she told me. “It’s not curative,” she said, pointing out that the strongest claims so far are that it merely shortens the recovery of Covid-19 patients. “We need either a cure or a vaccine.”

But she can’t envision that vaccine anytime in the next year, while Covid-19 will remain a crisis much longer than that.

“I’ve been telling everybody that my event horizon is about 36 months, and that’s my best-case scenario,” she said.

“I’m quite certain that this is going to go in waves,” she added. “It won’t be a tsunami that comes across America all at once and then retreats all at once. It will be micro-waves that shoot up in Des Moines and then in New Orleans and then in Houston and so on, and it’s going to affect how people think about all kinds of things.”

They’ll re-evaluate the importance of travel. They’ll reassess their use of mass transit. They’ll revisit the need for face-to-face business meetings. They’ll reappraise having their kids go to college out of state.

So, I asked, is “back to normal,” a phrase that so many people cling to, a fantasy?

“This is history right in front of us,” Garrett said. “Did we go ‘back to normal’ after 9/11? No. We created a whole new normal. We securitized the United States. We turned into an antiterror state. And it affected everything. We couldn’t go into a building without showing ID and walking through a metal detector, and couldn’t get on airplanes the same way ever again. That’s what’s going to happen with this.”

Not the metal detectors, but a seismic shift in what we expect, in what we endure, in how we adapt.

Maybe in political engagement, too, Garrett said.

If America enters the next wave of coronavirus infections “with the wealthy having gotten somehow wealthier off this pandemic by hedging, by shorting, by doing all the nasty things that they do, and we come out of our rabbit holes and realize, ‘Oh, my God, it’s not just that everyone I love is unemployed or underemployed and can’t make their maintenance or their mortgage payments or their rent payments, but now all of a sudden those jerks that were flying around in private helicopters are now flying on private personal jets and they own an island that they go to and they don’t care whether or not our streets are safe,’ then I think we could have massive political disruption.”

“Just as we come out of our holes and see what 25 percent unemployment looks like,” she said, “we may also see what collective rage looks like.”

Garrett has been on my radar since the early 1990s, when she worked for Newsday and did some of the best reporting anywhere on AIDS. Her Pulitzer, in 1996, was for coverage of Ebola in Zaire. She has been a fellow at Harvard’s School of Public Health, was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and consulted on the 2011 movie “Contagion.”

Her expertise, in other words, has long been in demand. But not like now.

Each morning when she opens her email, “there’s the Argentina request, Hong Kong request, Taiwan request, South Africa request, Morocco, Turkey,” she told me. “Not to mention all of the American requests.” It made me feel bad about taking more than an hour of her time on Monday. But not so bad that I didn’t cadge another 30 minutes on Thursday.

She said she wasn’t surprised that a coronavirus wrought this devastation, that China minimized what was going on or that the response in many places was sloppy and sluggish. She’s Cassandra, after all.

But there is one part of the story she couldn’t have predicted: that the paragon of sloppiness and sluggishness would be the United States.

“I never imagined that,” she said. “Ever.”

The highlights — or, rather, lowlights — include President Trump’s initial acceptance of the assurances by President Xi Jinping of China that all would be well, his scandalous complacency from late January through early March, his cheerleading for unproven treatments, his musings about cockamamie ones, his abdication of muscular federal guidance for the states and his failure, even now, to sketch out a detailed long-range strategy for containing the coronavirus.

Having long followed Garrett’s work, I can attest that it’s not driven by partisanship. She praised George W. Bush for fighting H.I.V. in Africa.

But she called Trump “the most incompetent, foolhardy buffoon imaginable.”

And she’s shocked that America isn’t in a position to lead the global response to this crisis, in part because science and scientists have been so degraded under Trump.

Referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and its analogues abroad, she told me: “I’ve heard from every C.D.C. in the world — the European C.D.C., the African C.D.C., China C.D.C. — and they say, ‘Normally our first call is to Atlanta, but we ain’t hearing back.’ There’s nothing going on down there. They’ve gutted that place. They’ve gagged that place. I can’t get calls returned anymore. Nobody down there is feeling like it’s safe to talk. Have you even seen anything important and vital coming out of the C.D.C.?”

The problem, Garrett added, is bigger than Trump and older than his presidency. America has never been sufficiently invested in public health. The riches and renown go mostly to physicians who find new and better ways to treat heart disease, cancer and the like. The big political conversation is about individuals’ access to health care.

But what about the work to keep our air and water safe for everyone, to design policies and systems for quickly detecting outbreaks, containing them and protecting entire populations? Where are the rewards for the architects of that?

Garrett recounted her time at Harvard. “The medical school is all marble, with these grand columns,” she said. “The school of public health is this funky building, the ugliest possible architecture, with the ceilings falling in.”

“That’s America?” I asked.

“That’s America,” she said.

And what America needs most right now, she said, isn’t this drumbeat of testing, testing, testing, because there will never be enough superfast, super-reliable tests to determine on the spot who can safely enter a crowded workplace or venue, which is the scenario that some people seem to have in mind. America needs good information, from many rigorously designed studies, about the prevalence and deadliness of coronavirus infections in given subsets of people, so that governors and mayors can develop rules for social distancing and reopening that are sensible, sustainable and tailored to the situation at hand.

America needs a federal government that assertively promotes and helps to coordinate that, not one in which experts like Tony Fauci and Deborah Birx tiptoe around a president’s tender ego.

“I can sit here with you for three hours listing — boom, boom, boom — what good leadership would look like and how many more lives would be saved if we followed that path, and it’s just incredibly upsetting.” Garrett said. “I feel like I’m just coming out of maybe three weeks of being in a funk because of the profound disappointment that there’s not a whisper of it.”

Instead of that whisper she hears wailing: the sirens of ambulances carrying coronavirus patients to hospitals near her apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where she has been home alone, in lockdown, since early March. “If I don’t get hugged soon, I’m going to go bananas,” she told me. “I’m desperate to be hugged.”

Me, too. Especially after her omens.

Comments (18)

Being in Opposition is never fun.  Being in Opposition during a pandemic is even worse.

Power and no power: in one job, you get to answer questions, and everyone listens to what you have to say.  In the other job, you only get to ask questions, and no one ever notices you.

A million years ago, when Yours Truly was Special Assistant to Jean Chretien, the Leader of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition neatly summarized the distinction for me.  He was a bit grumpy, and so I asked him what was wrong.

“I like answering questions,” Canada’s future greatest Prime Minister said.  “I don’t like asking them.”

When you are an Opposition leader, Chretien later said to me, your job is to oppose.  Your job is not to give the government foot rubs and encouragement.

As a result, voters will ask you “why you’re so negative all the time.”  And: “Don’t you have anything constructive to offer?”  The media will get in on the act, too.  But that’s only because the media like to corner the market on asking lots of negative, non-constructive questions.

During the Great Pandemic, the job of an Opposition leader becomes even worse.  In Ontario, for example, Doug Ford has done so well that his fiercest critics are regularly singing his praises.  Ford has looked and sounded empathetic and informed.  He’s spoken to Ontarians.  He hasn’t spoken at them.

As a result, his principal opponents have simply vanished, like Jimmy Hoffa.  They’re invisible.  Does anyone even remember what they look like?

Now, invisibility isn’t all bad.  Take Joe Biden, for example.  The presumptive Democratic presidential candidate effectively won the primaries a few days ago, and then promptly slipped into the political shadows.

There’s a reason for that, as a Democratic friend reminded me: “When your opponent is destroying himself, don’t interrupt him.”

And, holy Toledo, has Donald Trump been busy destroying himself, or what?  Before 2016, every American knew he was a racist and a criminal and a thug, so they knew what they were getting when they voted for him.  They’d be getting a racist and a criminal and a thug.

But ingesting disinfectants?  Beaming light into people’s bodies?  At that point, on that fateful night, Donald Trump became an object of pure ridicule.  A walking joke.  And he handed his Opposition leader a ready-made campaign slogan:

“Joe Biden: he won’t inject you with bleach.”

Andrew Scheer, for reasons known only to himself, decided to do the reverse.  He decided to get visible during the pandemic.  Scheer hopped on a crowded Ottawa-bound government jet with his wife and his one hundred kids, and got busy.

On the day after the worst mass-murder in recent Canadian history, for instance, Scheer decided to make the scheduling of Question Period his top issue.  And, when questioned about a Conservative MP and leadership nobody who had made racist remarks about Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer?  Scheer shrugged.

No biggie, to him.  He wants way more Question Periods.

Pro tip, Blandy Andy: Canadians see Question Period as what is wrong with government.  Not what is right about it.

And attacking public servants who can’t defend themselves from political smear-merchants  Canadians don’t see that as very fair, at all.  They don’t like it.

What did Andrew Scheer get after his ill-considered decision to get super noisy and all oppositional during a pandemic?  He got members of his caucus demanding that he step down right away, that’s what.  He got a poll showing Justin Trudeau’s popularity has skyrocketed upwards, some twenty percentage points.

That’s what he got.

Being a leader of the Opposition is no fun, true.  But being an Opposition leader during a time of actual crisis – when most everyone agree that we all need to set aside petty differences, and pull together for the common good – requires skill and intelligence.  Neither of which, it is now painfully evident, Andrew Scheer possesses in abundance.

If your opponent is setting himself on fire, as Bleach Boy Donald Trump is doing, don’t interrupt.  But if your opponent is doing a pretty good job in a crisis – as Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford are clearly doing – don’t interrupt that, either.

As Opposition leader during a pandemic causing death and misery everywhere, your job is not to just carry on as usual, and oppose oppose oppose.

Your job is to be quiet, and wait your turn.

Comments (37)

I saw a pandemic-time video Nick Lowe did with his son and I loved it. Just the two of them, playing in their living room. Was awesome.

So, I decided to do likewise. Here’s a tune I wrote a million years ago, about a life from a million years ago. (Tracy Nesdoly knows.)

I wish to express my thanks to my bandmates Drum Machine, Distorted (Bass) Chords, and Sir Galaxie 500-ish Guitar Bits. And our producer, naturally, Eight Track Tascam.

More to come, whether you like it or not!

Comments (3)

Comments (4)