February 13, 2025
After 100 days of war with COVID it's clear our governments have lost
The war must go on. But sitting here in still-locked-down Toronto, stewing in my own bile, I cannot say this is filling me with patriotic fervour.
The war must go on. But sitting here in still-locked-down Toronto, stewing in my own bile, I cannot say this is filling me with patriotic fervour.

At first, comparisons to wartime seemed a bit silly. All we were being asked to do, after all, was stay indoors. As the World Health Organization was declaring a pandemic 100 days ago, the commanders had everything under control: the borders, the epidemiology, the strategy, support for shuttered businesses and their employees. Traditionally, wartime puts those of us left on the home front to work whether we like it or not. This was entirely the opposite: the worst we would have to put up with — in theory, assuming government aid was as advertised — was the indignity of idleness. Collective inaction would flatten the curve, the forces of COVID-19 would be beaten back, and summer would be saved. Peace in our time.

And then it instantly turned to quagmire. Canadians watched slack-jawed as COVID-19 breached our most fundamental defences. You don’t need Sun Tzu’s perspicacity to inform people arriving in Canada of their responsibility to self-isolate, and exactly what self-isolation means — go directly home, do not stop for groceries, do not receive visitors. I just did it, right there, in half a sentence. But we couldn’t manage it: Where information was distributed at all, it was excessively complex even as it failed to deliver the central message. Provincial forces threatened mutiny. Alberta Commander-in-Chief Jason Kenney stormed into the Edmonton airport demanding answers. It took weeks to sort out.

Then we learned that the strategic mind behind the federal war effort believed that covering one’s mouth and nose increased the risk of contracting a virus that transmits via the mouth and nose. (This came not long after she had poo-pooed the risk COVID-19 posed to Canada in the first place.) We learned federal forces had allowed stockpiles of personal protective equipment to expire without replacing them, and sent tons more to China without any plan to replace it should we need it. Suddenly the airport shemozzle looked entirely predictable. Like so many of history’s military commanders, these seemingly very confident people weren’t operating entirely in the realm of objective reality.

Luckily this is a multi-pronged, decentralized campaign — and much of it, touch wood, has gone very well indeed. Ranked against OECD countries, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Newfoundland, New Brunswick and P.E.I. are at or near the bottom of the table for COVID-19 cases and deaths per capita. British Columbia hasn’t fared much worse.

It was Canada’s two largest divisions that let down the side. At 2,226 cases and 173 deaths per million, Ontario is 40 per cent and 25 per cent above average for the total OECD population, respectively. Public health officials have baffled journalists and television viewers alike with ever-changing narratives about inadequate testing and asymptomatic transmission and what we should and shouldn’t do — “shovelling fog,” as University of Toronto epidemiology professor David Fisman put it. We were told we had ample resources for contact tracing. Then we learned many of those resources were devoted to manually populating databases from documents spat out of fax machines.

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See Also:

(1) How to fix a national embarrassment

(2) Canada expected to see spike in divorces as courts reopen, lawyers say (Jack: Canadian incompetent politicians. Canada’s happy homewreckers.)