February 6, 2025
Reopening schools is our only sensible option. Now politicians need to admit it
The casualness with which Canada’s education ministers have blown up months of children’s education, replacing it with nothing useful, allowing kids to advance or graduate regardless, does not inspire much confidence in the systems they oversee.
The casualness with which Canada’s education ministers have blown up months of children’s education, replacing it with nothing useful, allowing kids to advance or graduate regardless, does not inspire much confidence in the systems they oversee.

One of the sadder non-medical spectacles of the COVID-19 pandemic has been watching Canadians who place great trust and value in official expertise struggle to cope with shifting, inscrutable and often downright baffling advice. The mask issue alone created crippling doses of cognitive dissonance. It wasn’t long ago that questioning Ottawa’s official wisdom on masks — not useful; potentially detrimental — would get you shouted at on social media. Now that mask skepticism is the domain of Donald Trump and his fans, the same technocrats are as likely to shout at you for questioning mandatory mask rules.

Pleading questions abound: Why are we allowed X number of people or families in our bubble and not X+1? Why is golf allowed but not cricket? Why were we allowed to walk through parks but not sit down in them? Why are they freaking out about people on beaches, when the risk of outdoor transmission seems minute? Why the hell did Ontario allow asymptomatic COVID-positive temporary foreign agricultural workers into the fields? What did they expect other than the huge outbreaks they’re now dealing with? I myself have asked a million times why, having finally come around to the efficacy of masks and quite logically advising against taking them on and off throughout the day, governments keep qualifying “wear a mask” with situational caveats like “when you can’t social distance.” What possible risk are they trying to offset?

They’re all fine questions, but we are well past the point where it’s worth asking them. In Ontario and Quebec, certainly, governments long ago forfeited the right to dictate our day-to-day pandemic lives. I’m not offering to pay anyone’s fines, but your common sense is almost certainly going to keep you just as safe, if not safer, than assiduously following government rules to the letter.

Unfortunately, we only have so much room to push back. And governments will have even greater power to screw up our lives and livelihoods come September, when by rights all Canadian children should be able to physically go back to school and their parents to work. Here in Ontario, it’s a power the government seems alarmingly willing to use.

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