Editorials - Sept. 2, 2021

Life in the ‘in-between’  

Life between lockdowns and normalcy is proving to be as difficult as being in the height of a lockdown in some respects. On the verge of returning to our regular routine, but being worried about rising case numbers and the Delta variant can bring a whole new set of problems.
 

Just ask any volunteer. Knowing what is safe, what isn’t and what can be offered is keeping everyone on the edge of their seat. Earlier this summer the annual Threshers’ reunion had to be cancelled yet again. Luckily they have found a one-day, drive-through version, and just have to work hard to get the word out. Most of the fairs, festivals and performances in the area are getting creative to provide alternative means of delivering some programming, but the planning process is not easy for any of them. Occasionally the uncertainty and frustration can be overwhelming. Christmas sales and shows should be booked by now, but not knowing what will happen in the fall is leaving everything marked “tentative” or “to be determined” for now. The popular refrain is “we’ll have to see what happens once the children go back to school”.
 

Even now in the summer for the general public, everything seems like we’ve stumbled into some parallel universe where we cautiously venture out to restaurants and outdoor theatre. It seems familiar, yet everywhere we are greeted with masked customer service representatives guiding us in a single direction, reminding us to keep six feet away from others, blocking our entrance “just until two people leave the store” and then squirting us with sanitizer at the entrance. Hopefully the combination of vaccines and improved treatments finally ends the vortex. – DS

The road to ‘Otawa’

No one’s perfect, but part of being a professional is doing the best you can to get there. A big part of that is paying attention to detail.
 

Last week, the Conservative Party distributed pamphlets in Toronto supporting leader Erin O’Toole containing six egregious spelling  errors. There was a reference to “Ant-Corruption”, and the worst of all, “Otawa”, O’Toole’s very destination. Throw in “creatng”, “enactng”, “essental” and “acton”, (maybe the “I” key was broken?),  and you have six distinct spelling errors in a total of just 95 words. In it, O’Toole pledges to “clean up the mess” in the aforementioned “Otawa”, but perhaps he has another mess to clean up first.
 

It’s very likely that O’Toole has absolutely nothing to do with the production of the pamphlets, but the attention to detail that would weed out these kinds of mistakes is surely needed when running a country.
 

Liberal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland ran into her own trouble regarding a lack of attention to detail last week when she Tweeted a video about O’Toole and health care that was flagged as “manipulated media”. As a former journalist who studied at both Harvard and Oxford, Freeland certainly needs to do better and know that what she Tweets is correct. In Freeland’s case, her party has been at the forefront of fact-checking - a claim that has become most commonly associated with right wing politicians and news outlets - so she and other Liberals need to “walk the walk” if they want to fact-check others.
No one should lose a vote over a typo, but attention to detail and the desire to get things right are all traits of a qualified leader. – SL 

A patchwork won’t work 

Medical Officers of Health across the province are banding together, saying they would be willing to implement their own vaccine passports if the Ontario government won’t step up and do the job.
 

While the government has said that vaccine receipts are enough, and Premier Doug Ford has clearly stated the province won’t be involved, though reporting earlier this week suggested his government is indeed planning a vaccine passport for the province, a group representing local public health agencies in the province says that individual health units could go ahead with mandating passports.
 

Dr. Paul Roumetiotis, the President of the Association of Local Public Health Agencies (ALPHA) and Medical Officer of Health for the Eastern Ontario Health Unit, said his health unit is exploring its own vaccine passport program, adding other health units should follow suit for provincial consistency. While Roumetiotis wants to push for as little “patchwork” as possible, each health unit instituting its own program could lead to passports being hard to mandate and even harder to enforce, especially if bordering health units impose different regulations.
 

While it’s great that other health units have thrown their support behind Roumetiotis, the fact is that this needs to be done on a larger scale for it to be implemented and controlled effectively. Without the kind of universal application that a provincial or federal rollout would entail, there are going to be issues with confusion and more pushback and legal challenges than the move will already invite. 
 

The only way to tackle this issue effectively is to handle it at as high a level as possible, and if the highest level willing to take it on are local health units, the situation will get complicated quickly. – JDS