For The Love Of God, Ontario Liberals, Shut Up About COVID

A Plea To Beat Ford

One of the things that’s been pricking in my mind since the Omicron surge is the Ontario Liberal response to it, which was both “we should have avoided these restrictions” but also “Ford needs to do more” (if you can find the internal consistency here, you’re better than me), and it’s been bugging me. As a matter of public health, sure, Ford’s response has been shit, but that’s not what this site’s about. As a matter of politics, the Ontario Liberals need to find a new strategy, and by God, they need it fast.

I don’t know if it was ever party policy or just an idea that got some traction in the circles of left-wing Twitter that I and many OLP candidates reside in, but the Party talking about three-dose vaccine passports – for whatever the value they might hold in public health circles – is the exact wrong policy to take to the election, for one simple reason – we’ll be voting in early June, at a time when COVID is going to have been in the rearview mirror for a couple of months, and the voters will be looking for a message moving beyond COVID, and just not relitigating the past two years.

For those who think Ford is a unique evil amongst Conservative leaders – who think that of the Tory-Hudak-Brown-Ford quad the Tories somehow managed to make the worst one Premier – the goal has to be winning office, and in a country and a province that is mostly done with COVID, trying to relitigate COVID measures and talking about restrictions is a strategy designed to put Ford back into office. Like it or not, the population are ready to deal with COVID as a slightly more virulent strain of the flu, and they would like to be able to go to Leafs and Jays games without having to move through byzantine hoops and having to deal with the looming spectre that rules changes could fuck all of this up again.

The last two years have been exhausting, and part of that exhaustion is the fact that every decision and every choice is now so much harder than it has been in the past. Pre-COVID, the act of getting a drink with a friend was simple – when and where. Now, it’s a mess, with capacity limits, mask policies, and risk tolerances in the mix in a way it never was in the past, and it’s a drain on everyone. I have friends I haven’t seen in years and some newer ones I’ve never gotten to meet in person because of this fucking disease, and the idea of getting to go to Toronto and just relaxing for a weekend sounds incredibly pleasant to me, and for a lot of people it will be an attractive pitch. “COVID is over, things are back to normal” is an effective political pitch to a population where basically everyone who could be compelled to be vaxxed is.

On a more practical level, March, April, and May are going to be three months where vaccine passports are going to be not enforced by provincial order, and even if some places still decide to mandate it for a while, most people will be able to stop using it for the three months before the election. After three months, do you think calling for their reimposition will be popular? Of course not, at least not without some new variant or, you know, actual reason for it. Those calls for a three shot vax passport are even worse, because at some point, if the point of a mandate is to increase vaccine takeup, that’s just punitive. Yes, the level of those boosted may go up, but if you need three doses to be eligible to go anywhere in public life, you are saying that even doing the right thing now means you won’t be able to go out in public until early June – and, if this policy weren’t imposed until after the June election, it would be touch and go whether people would be eligible to go to public events by the Leafs home opener in the fall. If this sounds like a winning message to you, I’m not sure what world you’re living in.

At some point, the goal – which, remember, isn’t COVID-zero, but winning an election and getting to save Ontario from another four years of Ford – needs to matter more than whatever zealous principles matter to you. Winning an election with a populace that wants to be done with all of this – that wants to stop caring about vaccination status as the first part of a conversation when you run into a friend – requires compromising your principles for a message that the public will accept. Running as the people seeking to elongate this crisis in the eyes of the public is not one with legs.

Was Justin Trudeau’s 2021 campaign divisive? Of course it was, and it had to be, because there needed to be harsher restrictions on the unvaxxed as compared to the vaxxed to get coverage higher and get us more prepared for the future. It did its time. I don’t think Trudeau should have met with the convoy and I don’t really care if the unvaxxed ever get to board a plane again in their lives, but yeah, it was divisive. I think it was justified, and it also worked, but to pretend it wasn’t divisive is lunacy. The problem for the Ontario Liberals is that Doug Ford has a better record on vaccination than Erin O’Toole did, and Ford is getting to run in an electorate that’s ~90% vaxxed as opposed to Trudeau, who was running his campaign when ~70% of Canadian adults had been vaxxed. It’s an entirely different playbook now, and too much of the Ontario Liberal messaging on the topic has been reactive, and frankly ass backwards, to the world we’re walking into.

If the Ontario Liberals want to win the next election, they’ll do so by never talking about COVID. Anything else, and Doug Ford’s campaign is indefinite crisis versus normalcy, and he wins the next election at a walk.