A year.
A whole 12 months ago, a virus that had been surging elsewhere in the world finally caused a change to our day to day activities. Canadians have a tendency to look elsewhere and compare ourselves to other rich, privileged nations in places like Europe, while sneering at the boors down in the US. It was all too easy to give our relatively bland public servants a pass when self-aggrandizing ghouls like Trump, Cuomo and Desantis were making headlines constantly.
That’s our national blind spot, an unearned sense of . . .
superiority in a middling country that is still inexplicably bound to a “royal” family.
As National Post columnist Matt Gurney summed up in a recent piece:
“On what possible grounds do Canadians expect a stellar pandemic performance in a country where we have chronically overworked our health-care system for many, many years, despite warnings of precisely this kind of disaster? How can we even pretend to be deserving of a front-of-the-line effort when we spent years telling ourselves we’d learned the lessons of SARS, which we seemed to instantly forget once SARS-2 arrived?”
Quebec has had the dubious distinction of leading other jurisdictions across the country and the world for case counts and deaths. We have some incredibly damning data to pore over in the coming months, including a report from the military regarding the state of this province’s long term care facilities.
Though there’s some light at the end of the tunnel, with restrictions easing and vaccines rolling out, we are by no means out of the woods yet.
This week it was announced that some staff had tested positive at the long-term care facility in Shawville. Authorities didn’t announce an exact number, they simply stated that “less than five” staff were infected and they would be investigating further. This is what we know at print time, on Monday evening. It could very well change for the better or worse within the distance between this keyboard and the printing press.
Everyone is hoping that this outbreak stays small and we don’t lose any Pontiacers to this virus. Long-term care has been at the forefront of deaths caused by COVID, and there needs to be a serious re-think about how we treat the elderly and disabled. This was a glaring issue before this virus, now it’s a crisis. The only positive outcome would be that the people in charge of running our country learned a hard lesson from all this death and destruction and worked to ensure something like this never happens again.
Unfortunately, it’s more likely that we’ll be facing a federal election before the year is up and the same shenanigans and incompetence will be ignored, so long as the dolts south of our border are more spectacularly bad at their jobs.
Caleb Nickerson
