The Illusion of Choice

 The surprising thing, on first glance, is not that the province is back in (semi-)lockdown, but that it took so much time to get here, and that so many feathers were unnecessarily ruffled along the way.

 

I will bypass (for the moment) the issues around vaccine strategy, or the curious absence of strong measures targetted at warehouses, meat-packing plants, and other large areas of potential and actual spread, and pick up another thread from the tapestry.

 

Why did this come as a surprise?

 

The papers were filled with complaints from restauranteurs who were, essentially, pulled into a false position by the government encouraging them to open patios a week or two before shutting them down. The government went from talking about allowing barbers to open to imposing a new grey zone on all of Ontario within about 48 hours. The follow-up of a stay-at-home order has taken less than a week.

 

But none of this was, in fact, sudden. The numbers have been speaking for weeks to anyone who can do any sort of extrapolation.

 

There is, in fact, a really straightforward, obvious, and more effective way of doing all this. It's to sit down with epidemiologists and work out a model where this sort of R1 factor generates that protective reaction as an immediate response, and then publish the schedule in the Ont. Regs. as actual law.

 

The rules might need tweaking occasionally as new evidence came to light (e.g. of specific activities being more or less risky). But essentially, they wouldn't suffer from the sort of foot-dragging we've just seen (which translates into lives) or whiplash-inducing reversals, which are bad politics and cost money to people (sometimes, to the government itself).

 

So why don't we see it? It's not just Ontario; the same sort of see-sawing back and forth is visible elsewhere.

 

Part of it, no doubt, is classic politics, in the sense of being the product of reacting to varying pressures and trying to find compromise. But I think that far more of it is leaders trying to preserve the illusion, to themselves as much as to anyone else, that they have power. By reserving decisions, by making the changes on rules those of sudden emergency orders-in-council, it draws a veil over the fact that their leeway for decision is very small.

 

That doesn't mean that they don't have power. The continuing refusal of the provincial government to enact paid sick leave has shortened many peoples' lives. (It had shortened lives before the pandemic as well, but less visibly.) It is always possible to affect the course of events by doing a bad job, or an exceptionally good one. But within the way this has been framed, even though they may delay or fudge, the final decisions are being driven by the virus, and, particularly, by the capacity of the hospitals. (The new status, I am convinced, derives not from the number of people who are ill, but by the ICUs approaching capacity.)