Vax Pass

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I am in the midst of being the Campaign Chair (a silly title if there ever there was one) for the Peoples Party of Canada candidate in Victoria, John Randal Phipps. Which is my excuse for not blogging much.

The single issue in this campaign is the Vax Passport set to be introduced in BC tomorrow. This is a particularly obnoxious idea. Basically, it is a rule that people have to show proof of vaccination (and I use that term loosely) in order to access pubs, restaurants, sporting events, gyms and so on.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with health. Rather, it is a means to coerce and punish the unvaccinated. Which is nuts simply because the vaxxed are able to be infected and transmit the virus but are less likely to know they actually have the damn thing.

Here is the Israeli Ministry of Health on its version of the Vax Pass:

@Harrison_of_TX @SaltyCracker9 @MaajidNawaz @Iromg @JamesDelingpole https://t.co/5rGyDLwiBR

— President Elect Fifi 😊🗣️ (@Fifi_Borgia) September 12, 2021

My own bet is that the BC Vax Passport, despite our superabundance of Karens, will fail in a matter of weeks. First off, of the 5 million or so British Columbians less than 1.5 million have applied for their vax passport. That leaves 3.5 million without papers. Second, while there may very well be enforcement at large venues, I can’t imagine a lot of very close to the edge pubs and restaurants showing a Gestapo like diligence in checking their potential patrons at the door. While the restaurants were packed tonight with people enjoying their “last suppers”, after about a week of 25% houses, the hospitality industry is going to get very slack. (And, amusingly, the BC Government has given fast food places and cafes an exemption for dining in without alcohol for 30 minutes or less. The MickyD’s exemption. They really are just making shit up.)

I have two bright kids, one a coder, one a designer, working away at my own, private Vax Pass App. It will look quite a bit like the BC Gov’t app – when that is available – and it will feature a QR code (see above, took three clicks) leading to a web page with something like.

I’m Good…Thanks

or,

Good Service gets great Tips

At a guess, in a couple of weeks, that will be more than enough to gain entry to most of the smaller venues – if those venues ask at all.

Never underestimate the power of human laziness when people are asked to do a silly thing which will cost them money.

#NoVaxPassportsAnywhere

#VotePPC

John Randal Phipps – PPC – Victoria BC

Elections

Lib…Lib-Lite

Apparently Justin Trudeau thinks that the best use of the nation’s time as we head into a Delta driven 4th wave of COVID is to have an election. Okay, I never thought he had any judgement and an election call at the moment would confirm that but here we are.

There are huge issues facing Canada. Unfettered immigration, useless but expensive carbon taxes, deficits to 2070, price inflation, real estate markets which have put housing in the luxury goods category, a stalled First Nations reconciliation process, the collapse of any number of energy projects, increased homelessness, opioid deaths, a health care system which seems incapable of dealing with even a fairly mild pandemic, senior care in a shambles where our elderly died in droves as much from neglect as COVID and on and on.

Judging from the Liberals activities in the run up to the election, while those issues get the occasional nod, the strategy seems to be to spend lots of money in seats the Libs either hold or would like to win. As to substance, the Libs seem very committed to “doing something” about climate change, keeping immigration levels up over 400,000 per year and not being racist. Unfortunately, this is also pretty much the substantive position of the Conservative Party. The CPC’s big selling point is getting rid of Justin and his gender balanced Cabinet of flakes.

No doubt, over the course of a campaign, these positions will be “fleshed out” but there’s where the two main parties stand going into the election. There may be issues surrounding COVID vax mandates for federal employees and for institutions (read banks) which are federally regulated. The current polling suggest Canadians like authoritarian measures to defeat the virus which is why Trudeau floated the mandate and why we have not heard a word against it from the Conservatives.

The paid for media and the CBC – but I repeat myself – will cover the election like a horse race. Polls will be taken and breathlessly reported. A leaders’ debate will be held and performances will be compared. The NDP and the Green Party will be taken seriously for a few weeks. The Bloc will be ignored simply because it does not run outside Quebec.

The consensus position, tacitly agreed upon by the major parties and the major media is that despite COVID and deficits and slow economic activity there is very little need for significant change. The big question being whether Trudeau will gain a majority or if O’Toole can hold him to a minority.

You will notice I do not mention Max Bernier or the Peoples’ Party. I don’t because the PPC plays outside the consensus. The PPC and its supporters think that significant change is absolutely required and that issues like the deficit, immigration, economic development, First Nations policy, housing and health care need new thinking. (I also don’t mention the Maverick Party but will discuss it in a subsequent post.)

The mainstream parties and their captive media will be running in a consensus election fought lightly in a couple of dozen urban ridings in BC and Ontario. Outside those ridings Max and the PPC will be addressing real problems and offering real solutions.

Will it matter? In terms of seats and outcomes, while I would be delighted to see the PPC win a few seats, the real target for the PPC is the national and regional popular vote. Yes, I do know that does not matter electorally. After all, the CPC won the popular vote in the last federal election. (My own sense is that the Maverick Party has some chance of winning seats in Alberta and Saskatchewan which will be discussed in that subsequent post.)

Max and the PPC need to crack the 5% barrier this time out. If they can do that and Max can win in Beauce, they will have sent a huge message to the CPC. That message is important. Now, if Max and the PPC manage to cut through and beat the Greens – not an unrealistic goal – the message that there are real problems which need real solutions will go mainstream whether the gatekeepers like it or not.

There are really two elections coming up: the Tweedledum and Tweedledee, paid for media, horse race and a vote on whether Canada is a serious country.

Coercion, Mandates and Vax Passes

The government of Quebec is planning on introducing a vax passport. The government of Canada is looking at “mandating” COVID vaccination as a condition of employment for the federal government and corporations regulated by the feds. Dr. Bonnie Henry hinted today that she was fed up with healthcare workers who were not vaxed. If you want to enter a restaurant in New York City you have to prove at least one shot.

As I have said before, I am not at all an “anti-vaxer”, I am just not in any rush to get “the jabs” as I would like a lot more data on their long term effects. One mid term effect which is now emerging is that the efficacy of the jab in preventing serious illness appears to wane at about the 6 month mark. And, of course, the jab does not prevent infection or transmission of COVID, it appears to reduce the severity of COVID should you contract it. And all of this comes at the price of potential adverse consequences for a small number of those jabbed.

Against that people are arguing that there are good reasons to encourage people to get jabbed – principally their own health. Encouragement in the form of celebrity endorsements, free stuff, lotteries and the like seem like fair ball to me. But we go over the foul line when we impose consequences for not being jabbed.

I use the term “consequences” advisedly. Not being permitted to attend an event without vax proof is a consequence and, in my view, incompatible with a rights based view of humanity. It is a mild infringement to be sure, but it really is the top of a slippery slope and should be subject to strict scrutiny. Now, it can be argued that a venue or a rock band or a restaurant has a right to exclude whomever it wants so long as it does so without violating general anti-discrimination laws. However, this sort of exclusion regime will almost certainly be operated using government issued credentials.

The entire concept of a vaccine “passport” or “certificate” issued by the government – provincial, in the case of Canada – is acceptable right up until it is used to visit consequences, however well-intentioned, on those who lack that passport. This is not a loss of “priviledge”, it is the loss of the most basic right to be treated equally because you are person and a citizen.

Confronted with a disease which has a recovery rate of 99.9% for the non-elderly and relatively healthy the inner authoritarian in everyone from Premiers to pundits suddenly is put on parade.

“Just as we began to think the COVID pandemic was coming to an end, a fourth wave has arrived, due almost entirely to the unvaccinated. As a result, restrictions are coming back, masks are returning, and our short precious summer looks like it may become even shorter yet.  Scott Gilmore, Macleans

(Interestingly Gilmore is so eager to administer “the stick” that he contradicts his claim about the nasty unvaccinated in the very next paragraph. “Even those of us who fully vaccinated are being forced to mask back up. This is because we have now learned that the new and deadly Delta variant can still be carried and transmitted by the immunized.” Which is it Scott? And, Scott, look up the word “immunized”.)

Once that inner authoritarian is in charge, the sky is the literal limit – no flights for the unvaxed, no restaurant dining and, at the extreme end, no job, no grocery shopping, no public transport. The rationales range from the alleged danger of the unvaxed spreading the disease to interesting theories about how the unvaxed will destroy “herd immunity” and act as human petri dishes for the incubation of ever nastier “variants”. That there is not a shred of evidence for any of these outcomes does not seem to deter the “papers please” crowd.

I suspect parts of Canada are in for a nasty, authoritarian, fall. Scott Gilmore is a reliable indicator of bien pensant thinking in Canada and he wants to beat the unvaxed with all manner of sticks. Can’t wait really. The government of Quebec, fresh off six months of curfews, seems to enjoy curtailing the rights of it citizens.

The BC government seems more modest in its medical authoritarianism – vax mandates for healthcare workers, maybe. But BC’s case numbers are going back up and with that rises a need to “do something”.

Here is the root problem: COVID19 is not going away. It will, eventually, but when is deeply uncertain. The “vaccines” don’t actually work quite as well as had been hoped. They do not immunize, rather they confer a degree of protection from serious illness. With flu season just around the corner, the public health establishment has pretty much run out of bullets. A fact tacitly conceded in Alberta where all restrictions have been cancelled as has non-symptomatic testing.

Vax mandates and passports are not going to change the COVID outcomes. They will let Scott Gilmore put a bit of stick about and Premier François Legault to coerce the long suffering people of Quebec a while longer but there is no reason to believe this is anything but an extension of the sanitary theatre we have had to put up with for the last 18 months.

The Gilmores and Legaults might be better advised to look at improving the general health of the population, actually building the backup facilities to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed and to take a serious look at the treatment options for COVID. Not nearly as much good, clean, totalitarian fun; but ultimately more productive.

Proud Dad

Simon Currie said Lowndes was a friend of his for 20 years.

“Jay took me in when nobody else really would,” he told CTV News. “The police need to stop killing Indigenous people.” BCTV

Simon (rose tattoo above) and I disagree on virtually every political point. But he gets the fundamentals right.

Killing anyone who is trapped in a parked car is revolting. No police officer should ever do that unless there is a clear need for self-defence. It is an operational failure and a complete failure in supervision and training.

Jared Lowndes was murdered. The officers who killed him need to be charged with the crime. Usual presumption of innocence but the evidence needs to be tried and a verdict reached.

I’m proud of Simon for standing up and demanding justice for Jared Lowndes.

Math

Much has been written about the government of Ontario’s plan to decolonize Grade 9 math in the name of social justice. It is a stupid idea for any number of reasons. Apparently, math as currently taught is too objective which means that it excludes other ways of knowing. And so on.

In the great sorting hat of modern society, math, because it is objective and only partially language based has always been a route forward for immigrants of all hues for generations. You might not speak English very well, but quadratic equations, trigonometry and algebra don’t care. With some hard work, even if your English assignments were terrible, the Vietnamese kid or the Sri Lankan or Filipino student could get an “A” in math and often do well at physics as well.

Being a math nerd is the least discriminatory niche in a high school ecology.

I was never much good at math. In Ontario I would have been decolonized twice because I took Grade 9 math twice – once during regular term and once in the summer following Grade 9 because my parents recognized that my barely passing the first time was going to be a problem going forward. I stumbled along for two more years. In those years I managed to acquire just enough math to be able to understand and enjoy Physics 11 and Physics 12 (both taught by the single best teacher I ever had, R.A. Nordman.) (Later I learned a lot of statistics as an adjunct to a thesis I was trying to write. The thesis came to a sad end when my advisor said, “Oh, that should not be a problem, all you need are a couple of simultaneous differential equations.” I was cooked.)

The kids who were “good at math” generally went the STEM route in university, we math under achievers went off to the Arts or, sadly, the Faculty of Education where we were rarely troubled by math again.

“The education minister’s spokesperson Caitlin Clark told The Toronto Sun that the new curriculum reflects a changing world.

“We are taking action to ensure all children, especially those facing barriers to success, have meaningful pathways to quality learning, graduation, access to post-secondary education and good-paying jobs,” she said.”

This is reminiscent of the Indiana State Legislature attempting to fix the value of π at 3.2. There may be all sorts of good jobs which do not need a strong grasp of math but there are no jobs where a decolonized version of the subject will give you an edge.

But I may be looking at this through the wrong lens. A more imaginative lens would note that a) there were only so many “good-paying” (yes, the construction does grate but it’s a quote) jobs, b) certain, preferred, racialized groups were not getting an equitable number of those jobs because c) those jobs had the racialist requirement of a grasp of Grade 9 math which, d) was so racist that the preferred racialized groups were doomed by the system to fail. Take down the systemically racist hurdle of the current Grade 9 math curriculum and replace it with “anti-racist, anti-discriminatory learning environments” and “infuse Indigenous knowledges and perspectives meaningfully and authentically into the mathematics program.” Problem solved!

Or something like that.

In fact, all that this sort of nonsense ensures is that smart (and better off) parents – white, black, Asian – send their kids to private school or homeschool them or pay for after school tutoring. When the pure public school victims of this posturing arrive as undergraduates – courtesy of whatever diversity initiative is available – they will have no chance at a STEM education. There is no “Indigenous knowleges” based calculus or computer code or algorithmic logic. In short, the Ontario public education system is rendering its students, apparently all its students, unfit for the modern world.

And, of course, like most such programs the real beneficiaries are those, often already privileged, kids whose parents are able to pay for the Kumon classes or, well, in my case, summer school. The public school victims might get a job as a diversity hire, but someone has to actually write the code, calculate the stresses, figure out the odds and mine the data – and that someone will have a pretty solid grasp of Grade 9 math.

Losing the Thread

Driving past the gas station today Regular is $1.67 a litre. At the grocery store some perfectly ordinary eggs were $8.00 a dozen. Butter is $6.50 when not on sale.

On Canada Day some addled youth decided it would be a good idea to toss the statue of Captain Cook into the Inner Harbour. I rather doubt they had any idea who the great explorer and cartographer was, but he looked very 18th century and that was enough.

Over seven hundred people died during last weeks’ heat wave with around five hundred of those deaths attributed to the heat. Ambulance wait times went to over three hours.

Various polls suggest that Justin Trudeau is within sight of a majority were a federal election to be held now.

The remarkable thing about all of these little snippets of news is that they seem to be regarded as business as usual. Being taxed by an inflation rate which is well into the double digits does not cut through the COVID hype. Vandalism and arson purportedly in rage over residential school deaths which we have known about for decades attracts very little comment – though many First Nations people are not very happy that reservation churches which have served their communities for years are being burnt. People seem to shrug off the heat wave deaths and ambulance delays.

I expect very little from government at any level. A reasonably sound currency, a degree of public order and emergency services which can deal with the inevitable surges in demand.

The emergency services issue is probably the most easily fixed. Yes, having more para-medics is part of the solution but planning a reponse to these sorts of surge emergencies which tries to avoid the need for an ambulance in the first place is important too. Most of the dead were old, in many cases, very old. It should not be impossible to identify those older people and have a plan for these sorts of emergencies. Something as simple as a “Helpful Neighbour” program on a voluntary basis would be a good first step.

Restoring public order is more complicated. First, you have to have the political will to actually take on the problem. As we saw a couple of years ago, when it comes to people purporting to act on behalf of First Nations/environmental causes that will is absent. But even if the politicians decided that enough was enough there needs to be an investigation and an understanding of how the “spontaneous” vandalism and arson and blockades are driven. That is going to require rooting around in the activist community which will be, to say the least, difficult. The people who are actually creating the public disorder pay close attention to operational and communications security. Suffice to say this stuff is not being organized on a Facebook page.

Restoring order is also going to require a look at who benefits from disorder. To take an example: was it co-incidence that the sad fact of the Kamloops residential school graveyard came up just as the inquiry into Canada’s Winnipeg Lab’s connection to the Wuhan virology lab was heating up? The fact of there being a graveyard had been know for decades. The ground radar was being used to determine the boundaries so a new fence could be built. Yet, somehow, the number of bodies became headline news. I suspect, but cannot prove, that this was no accident. Public order will be restored when disorder is no longer in anyone’s interest.

Inflation is more complicated still. First off, the Liberal government and the Bank of Canada seem skeptical that there is any inflation worth mentioning and, if there is, seem convinced that it will be transitory. Second, the Liberals seem to think that with interest rates at record lows, borrowing lots of money makes a ton of sense. Third, the tools available to reduce inflation are all politically painful: reducing deficit spending means saying “no” to program and benefit expansion. Raising interest rates, even a little, would increase the cost of the government’s debt and the debt which Canadians have taken on in buckets during COVID. Plus, there is a federal election coming and no government wants to even tap on the brakes at the risk of losing votes.

In the past, inflation was largely self correcting. At a certain point the government would no longer find buyers for its bonds and would have to raise interest rates until it could. That brake has, to a degree, disappeared now that the Bank of Canada has decided to purchase government debt in apparently unlimited amounts.

The Modern Monetary Theory people will think this printing is a very good thing. I suspect it isn’t. What it creates is asset and price inflation. The $6.50 butter becomes $9.00 and the $1.67 gas becomes $3.00. But wages and salaries and even government benefits, are unlikely to keep pace. This clobbers the benefits, working and middle classes.

At the moment virtually all the Western economies are printing money fast and that means that the Canadian dollar is holding its value relative to other currencies. How long that will be the case remains to be seen. Similarly, interest rates are crawling along at less than 1%. Will that continue? I doubt it.

Bubbles burst. Eventually the dislocations caused by too much money in the marketplace will disturb and then dis-combobulate the system and the inflation will have to be squeezed from that system.

Politically, printing money is much more satisfactory than raising revenue and decreasing expenditures. There will be no action at all taken on inflation before the next federal election and it is not obvious that there will be any taken after. It is not obvious that Trudeau or his Cabinet have the foggiest idea that any of this is a problem. Nor, frankly, is it clear that O’Toole and the CPC would be much better.

The ideas of a stable currency, public order and good emergency services are beginning to sound a bit antique, quaint as it were. However, I suspect we’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Canada Day

I have never much liked Canada Day. Oh, the fireworks were a blast but an awful lot of the celebration seemed to me to be less about love of country and more about feeling smug. Last year the celebrations were virtual due to COVID, this year they are to be muted because unmarked graves have been found at the sites of residential schools. Apparently we are to have a day of reflection.

It is precisely this sort of moral preening which put me off Canada Day. I hate to say it but we’ve all known about the residential schools and their failings for decades. “Discovering” the graves of children who went there is horrific but, again, we knew that children died in those schools. But this year we are supposed to “reflect” on this fact.

This is typically Canadian. We’re going to reflect on the fact of the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of children while, essentially ignoring the current, awful conditions on many First Nations reserves.

If this country had any leadership at all, the Prime Minister, the leaders of the Opposition Parties and all of the Provincial Premiers would sit down and figure out how to, in the next year, get potable water to every First Nations reserve in Canada. Never mind the cost. Just get this basic thing done

Reflect on history all you want but start addressing the basic needs of First Nation Canadians as a matter of urgent, national, priority.

One Size fits All

Lauchie Reid: Hyacinths and Thistles. All images courtesy of the artist.

I got into a Twitter fight last night with a person – I think female but can’t tell for sure – who tweeted that she did not want to be in crowded indoor spaces with the unvaccinated and that they should stay outside like smokers.

I suspect we will hear a lot of this sort of thing over the next few months as COVID wanes and the vaccinated become a majority because it is not enough to be “protected”, the vaccinated seem to need to be isolated from the unvaccinated. Thus the call for vaccine passports and vaccinated only events.

The logic of this seems to rest on the idea that the “vaccine” is not 100% effective in preventing infection or transmission of COVID. What it does confer, apparently, is a reduction in the severity of the symptoms of COVID in the event that the vaccinated person is unlucky enough to catch the virus. You can see the problem, essentially a vaccinated person may be at the same risk for infection as an unvaccinated person and at the same risk of transmitting the bug as an unvaccinated person.

Now, frankly, I don’t think we have enough data one way or another on the vaccine’s efficacy in preventing infection or transmission – the early data seem pretty encouraging on the vaccine’s reducing the severity of the COVID symptoms and the mortality numbers are falling encouragingly. But separating the vaccinated from the unvaccinated is not at all obvious based on what we know so far.

My Twitter gal did not like that position at all and was eventually reduced to calling me “selfish” for not a) getting jabbed, b) for suggesting that there was no logic in separating people who could be infected and who could transmit the virus but who had the prospect of a better outcome if they did from people who could be infected and who could transmit the virus and only had a 99.9% chance of full recovery.

The COVID conversation usually comes down to people’s perception of the risk COVID presents. The vast majority of people who contract COVID feel badly for a few days and are done. Death from COVID is largely confined to people over 80 with one or more co-morbidities. At a clinical level doctors are becoming much, much better at treating the symptoms of COVID. This is not contested information. The daily statistics show much better outcomes for hospitalized patients. Even the “variants of concern” do not seem to have increased the lethality of COVID.

So a risk calculus with respect to the vaccine needs to begin with assessing an individual’s likelihood of a fatal outcome if he or she were to contract COVID. A 99.9 percent survival rate if you are under 80 and are not significantly compromised is a reassuring place to start. Does it make sense to take a new and untested vaccine to improve those odds? (And before we get into the weeds on testing, the vaccines all are being used based on an Emergency Use Approval which is not at all the same as the full testing which drugs typically undergo. That testing is ongoing and will be completed in late 2022 or early 2023.)

As I have consistently written about COVID, you have to manage your own situation which means being aware of and assessing what your life holds by way of risk. First off, do you live in an area with high rates of infection? Do you interact with strangers on a regular and continuous basis? What is your general health status? Do you get outdoor exercise? Individuals can assess these factors for themselves.

Against your personal risk profile when you are looking at “the jab” you would normally take the advice of the medical community which, in turn, would rely on the peer reviewed results of the drug testing the jab is undergoing. But those results are not yet available. Even the mid-term effects of mRNA based vaccines are more a matter of conjecture than evidence.

So the calculation is not so straightforward. As I happily say when asked, “Not yet, I’m in the control group.”

Which brings us back to “selfish”. I assess my personal risk of contracting – much less dying from – COVID as very close to zero which has meant I have been in no hurry to get jabbed. But my Twitter pal seems to think that is selfish. Somehow, my not being jabbed is going to…what? Make her jab less effective? Nope. Destroy herd immunity? No, at worse it may reduce herd immunity infinitesimally but there is very little evidence either way. Prevent her from feeling confident in enclosed crowded spaces? Maybe, but not at all my problem. Prevent the great re-opening? Possibly. The re-opening is a political decision and various politicians have come up with various metrics – case numbers, outbreaks, hospitalizations, first jab percentages, full jab percentages – to give the appearance of science to a purely political decision. Again, not my problem and not part of any rational, personal, risk calculation.

I suspect that the woman on Twitter was, in fact, driven by the very basic human tendency to want others to do what you are doing. When people are terrified, and COVID and the mass media have scared the Hell out of people, they want the security of the group. When the politicians, media and public health officers all say, “Everybody needs to get the jab,” it is much easier to go along with the crowd. Part of going along with the crowd is trying to herd dissenters into the ranks of the righteous. If they won’t be herded then, well, they’ll have to be ostracized.

The good news is that, as COVID fades, so will the zealous. As the threat recedes the urgency of the group think will diminish. As normal returns, attempts to separate the vaccinated sheep from the unvaccinated goats will lose their moral force.

My Twitter friend will have to find something else to be indignant about.

“Do Something”

COVID cases in BC have shown an alarming upswing. There are reports of people refusing to abide by the guidelines about gatherings. There are indications that the nasty Brazilian variant is on the rise. And, as always, hospitals are under tremendous pressure. Add to that a shortage of vaccines and the provincial government felt it had to act.

It announced a “non-essential” travel ban. The details are sketchy but in the first instance the police would be empowered to conduct random checks to ensure that no one left their Health Authority for non-essential purposes. (This was walked back a bit, now police will set up roadblocks to check on motorists.) And BC Ferries is cancelling the reservations of RVs. Constitutional niceties be damned, this time we’re serious.

There is simply no way that this “order” will work. Begin with the fact that Health Authority boundaries are principally administrative and that the average citizen is entirely unaware of where Coastal ends and Fraser begins. Worse, in the Lower Mainland, there are literally thousands of people who commute to work across the Fraser Coastal HA divide. Then there is the question of what is essential travel. (Probably best defined negatively as “travel whose purpose is not primarily recreational – take that you RVers.)

The entire scheme reeks of panic. Not panic at the relentless course of the virus, rather panic at the inability of the government to “do something” to stop that virus. A ban on ill defined non-essential travel between bureaucratic fiefs pretty much defines “half measure.”

There is a happy battalion of lefties who want nothing less than “COVID Zero” and who want that by way of a very strict, Australian style lockdown. Mandatory stay at home orders with only the most limited exemptions for food shopping. These people tend to refer to Dr. Bonnie Henry as a “libertarian” which they don’t mean in a nice way. It is certainly an option.

Counter poised to the “COVID Zero” types are people who don’t think lockdowns, masks and the various other non-pharmaceutical interventions are worthwhile – either because they don’t work or don’t work well enough to justify their significant economic, social and medical cost.

The great difficulty the current provincial government faces is that for any of the potential measures to work there has to be a level of public trust and agreement. It is becoming clear that the Canadian Courts take a dim view of fines and orders which are in direct violation of the Charter of Rights. All the provincial governments know this and it explains why so very few cases have been taken to Court. The last thing a government wants is for a Court to rule that its orders are unconstitutional.

Just as the COVID Zero people point at Australia and New Zealand, the anti-lock down people point at Florida and Texas. The COVID Zero folks point at case rates, the no lockdowners are more interested in deaths and hospitalizations. Both sides seem to agree that vaccination offers the best hope of beating the virus although there is some skepticism about whether “beating the virus” means eradicating it or reducing it to manageable levels.

Where people fall in this argument is largely a matter of their view as to the effectiveness of the state itself. Which is precisely where the travel ban fell apart. The one thing left and right will agree on is that a half hearted, unenforceable, unconstitutional set of restrictions will not work. That these restrictions were proposed at all undermines people’s confidence that the state can be effective. “Do something” is not the basis for policy which will have widespread support.

Right now, the government of British Columbia is faced with a set of unpleasant options. My own sense is that a really hard lockdown for a set period might still be possible; but that window is rapidly closing absent some truly horrible COVID outcomes. Which means that the default option of piecemeal activity, masking, closed restaurants and the hope that the vaccine and warmer weather work their magic is our most likely outcome.

Asinine

Erin O’Toole is not very bright. But sometimes he drops down to moronic. Attempting to kick Derek Sloan out of the CPC caucus – on the pretext that Sloan’s leadership campaign accepted a donation from one of Canada’s three Nazi adjacent minor character who donated under an unrecognized name – is idiocy on speed.

Where to start? Well, it appears that the donation in question slipped through without questions being raised by the Sloan campaign. This makes sense as the donation came from a Frederick P. Fromm which Sloan and his campaign were supposed to recognize as an alias, or maybe little used first name of….drum roll, Paul Fromm. How, exactly, they were supposed to recognize Fred as Paul is mysterious but O’Toole sees the acceptance of the donation as ““far worse than a gross error of judgment or failure of due diligence.” It is pretty much evil all the way down if there is a well-known white supremacist involved even if you do not have a clue at the time the donation is made.

Our Erin is having none of this sort of behavior in his “modern” Conservative Party. He promises to use his power as leader to prevent Sloan from running under the CPC banner in his riding. And just to make sure that no one thinks this is a mere clerical error, Erin turns the virtue signal dial to 11 with this ringing declaration, “Racism is a disease of the soul, repugnant to our core values. It has no place in our country. It has no place in the Conservative Party of Canada. I won’t tolerate it.” Suitable for MLK Day.

Sloan is too much of a socon for me to be a big fan but I am pretty sure he is not a racist. I might be wrong about that, but it does not matter one whit to our Erin: the opportunity to kiss up to the media establishment was too tempting. And, realistically, is there any place for Sloan in a “modern” Conservative party. Sloan is not actually a liberal in blue camouflage. He has been known to have strong views and, horrors, has been on Rebel Media. Double Plus Ungood!

Sloan has a substantial following among the deplorable socon wing of the modern Conservative party and our Erin is just dumb enough that he might think he can get rid of those dreadful people by firing Sloan. Fat chance.

Sloan himself has been rude enough to point out that if he, inadvertently took Nazi dollars, so did CPC HQ because 10% of leadership donations flowed through to CPC HQ. The cheek of the man!

But the very dumbest part of our Erin’s political calculus was forgetting that Sloan has an alternative party to go to: the PPC. Max would be delighted to welcome the PPC’s first sitting MP. And the PPC is a broad church in which socons are welcome. Max himself is more a libertarian but, no matter, if Derek Sloan wants to be the PPC’s Deborah Grey he’d be welcome.

As O’Toole’s stupidity becomes manifest his inability to come even close to Justin and the Libs’ polling numbers is causing many CPC members to do the following calculus: O’Toole can’t beat Trudeau, O’Toole is simply Liberal lite, voting for O’Toole will not get rid of Trudeau….Maybe I should look at somewhere else to vote. If Sloan came over to the PPC he might very well bring a lot of disgruntled CPC members and voters.