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Written by: Adam Riggio

There’s a profound difficulty in writing a criticism of Doug Ford’s COVID policy: it is so incredibly obvious what he and his government are doing wrong that pointing it out has no effect.

Anyone who has been paying attention to the actual scientific research on COVID understands that much more than the governments weak lockdowns whose rules have more holes than swiss cheese will be necessary to control the virus. A society doesn’t need to be in a permanent lockdown to stop the community spread of COVID. Such a lockdown must be extremely strict, but it need only last two to three weeks to stop the virus spreading from the initial outbreak. Providing, of course, that contract tracing efforts had enough resources to identify and test all likely infected people.

Will No One Rid Me of This Turbulent Doctor?

If containing outbreaks and preventing community spread is so simple to understand, it seems strange that the Ontario government, along with many other provincial, state, and local governments around North America refuse to follow that guidance. Our sense of logic creates dissonances with what we see. If the people with the power to act don’t take the obvious best route, there must be something interfering with our leaders’ natural understanding.

Two events this February can help us identify what that is, though a true diagnosis of the political pathologies of this government will be a much larger project. First, consider a disturbing report from the William Osler Health Network, Brampton’s hospital system. Dr. Brooks Fallis was until recently the interim director of critical care, a position he has held throughout the COVID pandemic so far.

Dr. Fallis has been extremely outspoken in the media since Ontario’s second wave of outbreaks began. His role as chief of Brampton’s critical care wards, where the most severe COVID cases from that city’s factories and warehouses end up, has shown him explicitly how inadequate the Ford government’s lockdown safeguards really are.

William Osler Health Network terminated Fallis’ contract in January. Though he still works in Brampton’s critical care wards, he’s now a front line grunt like everyone else, taking orders from his replacement. As the Globe and Mail revealed 2 February, Fallis was fired after a phone call Premier Doug Ford himself made to William Osler Health Network’s CEO Naveed Mohammad. The apparently enraged Premier essentially ordered Mohammad to silence the doctor’s public criticisms, allegedly even threatening drastic funding cuts to Brampton’s hospital system if Fallis wasn’t removed.

Democratic Integrity Relies on Public Trust

Public support for any government or leader depends on trust. Because public support for a government’s leadership is a key condition for it to stay in power in a democracy, any political leader is motivated to maintain the support and trust of the people. In ordinary times, it’s relatively easy to maintain public support, even when a government is acting in ways that are harmful to the public.

This is because most of those harms are indirect or systematic: the government passes a new law, changes or revokes old ones, changes regulations, grants authorization to some companies’ projects and not others. It most often takes work to see the results of a government’s action unfolding in the real lives of people. Even when you see the results, you don’t necessarily understand them as the results of government actions.

For an illustration, think of the collapse of the American mortgage market in 2007. An early initiative of the Bush Administration was a raft of laws that greatly relaxed rules by which people could qualify for mortgages. The result was that many people who were too poor or income-insecure to afford mortgages received them, and were able to take on the debt for many of them. But those mortgages were all ticking bombs to guarantee the revenues of the issuing banks: their first five years had very low interest rates before sharply spiking to produce now-unaffordable monthly payments. The massive 2007-8 wave of foreclosures followed, and its systematic effects imperiled the global economy.

The initial change in the law had no immediate effects of economic damage, but indirectly and systematically created conditions for a later financial crash. The financial crash itself cost the Bush government public credibility in America, but the change in mortgage laws had no effect, despite that being one necessary condition for the crash. Why? Because it was not immediately clear, without a great deal of study and research, to understand the broad effects that those new laws would have on the market.

The Ontario Government’s Failures Are Obvious

Regarding COVID policy, no government has any advantage of indirect effects. The direct effects alone of a failure in pandemic policy are clear and terrifying: exponential increases in outbreaks, infections, and people’s long-term disability and death. So when the Ford government’s policy to contain the second wave of the virus began to fail, we could all see that failure immediately. Weeks after measures were imposed, daily case counts across the province either plateaued at best, or continued to rise.

Likewise, it was easy to identify precisely what in the Ford government’s winter COVID policies was going wrong. The rules themselves contained many exemptions from any further restrictions than the relaxed period of the summer. Factories, wholesalers, shipping companies, and warehouses faced no additional restrictions over summer and fall’s regulations. Brampton has been one of the biggest COVID centres precisely because of recurring outbreaks in the city’s factories, wholesalers, and warehouses. The pace of those outbreaks has not abated throughout this winter’s lockdown.

Alongside these inadequate COVID safety measures, they also passed a law that made it practically impossible for a business that suffered an outbreak to be sued successfully or lose the insurance necessary to operate. This protected from any civil liability those very factories and warehouses, along with long-term-care homes that are now little more than battery farms for COVID incubation.

Yet in press conference after press conference, release after release, post after post, Premier Ford, Cabinet ministers, public health officials, and communications staffers continue to defend lockdown policies that are clearly failing to control the virus’ spread. Outright denial of what is plainly the case has become the communication policy for Ontario’s government.

Denial as Public Health Policy

Without measures to control its spread or treat the infected, COVID’s mortality and disability rate is high enough to threaten the long term continuation of human existence. Prevention of infection and adequate access to medical treatment, short of successful mass global vaccination, reduces the possible end of the human world to a mere horrifying endless catastrophe. And if global vaccination doesn’t progress quickly enough, vaccine-resistant strains of the virus can easily develop. So if a government is to protect its populace from COVID, they must quickly abandon any containment policy found ineffective.

Yet Doug Ford’s government has stood behind its inadequate lockdown policy for months. An important element of fighting the government’s complacency is figuring out why they do so. One fairly universal motivation is greed and corruption. In the world’s industrialized countries, most governments that have resisted effective COVID policy are right-wing like the Ontario Tories. Such political parties generally take their policy directions from business oligarchies, so are hostile to any pandemic regulations that could reduce the profits of the mega-wealthy who they serve. Regarding corruption, one need only consider how many former Ontario Conservative politicians and officials are owners and shareholders in the long-term-care homes privatized during the late 1990s.

Greed and corruption are necessary causes of COVID, but they aren’t sufficient. Mere greed and corruption can’t overcome nearly everyone in the face of horror, no matter their financial interests in the circumstances that produce that horror. Greed and corruption enable COVID denial policy, but ideology is necessary to lock such denial into an unbreakable principle.

Ideologies That Kill in the COVID Era

Survey the most notorious COVID denialist governments around the world and you will find many different ideological justifications for continuing the plague. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, since the pandemic began, has primarily dismissed masks, distancing, and other sensible protective measures as being “for fairies.” He stands on the ideological ground of extreme heterosexist homophobia. Those moral and political principles justify his authoritarian governance as manly and his anti-socialist mobilizations as crushing the weak to build a strong, masculine Brazil that dominates Latin America.

Jeanine Àñez’s Christian extremist ideology justified her government purposely allowing COVID to run amok in Bolivia’s Indigenous communities. She and neo-fascist ally Fernando Camacho in 2019 toppled the first Indigenous-dominated party ever to rule Bolivia in a violent coup. They then openly pursued a Christian supremacist government policy. Àñez herself characterized Indigenous Bolivians as satanists who deserved to be wiped out.

Donald Trump is one of the most fascinating COVID denialists because of his ideology’s complexity. Trump’s initial denialism, and the bizarrely upbeat approach he took to pandemic discussions throughout 2020, is rooted in what Gary Lachman described as one of America’s major schools of business mysticism, the Power of Positive Thinking.

As public outrage over his ineffective pandemic policy grew enough to threaten his re-election chances, Trump began using COVID denial as a kind of loyalty test for his Cabinet officials and leading politicians. Among Republican Party rank and file, COVID denial has come to serve the same function to discipline the Party as a Trump apparatus.

COVID Denial as a New Weapon in the War on Workers

Though the Ford government ostensibly takes COVID seriously, loopholes in their lockdown rules give businesses the freedom to force people to work despite on-site outbreaks. Ford refuses to start a government program to pay workers for sick days, while sitting on more than $12-billion in federal pandemic funding merely to balance spending deficits on their last budget before next year’s election.

Business owners and managers around North America haven’t done much to earn workers’ trust to protect them on their own. In Ontario, a third of all businesses were purposely breaking compliance with COVID safety through the winter wave, and Ford did nothing until there was enough media outrage. The Ford government continues to deny that the workers in these outbreak-ridden businesses are in any real danger, to make light of their concerns and deny workers the power to protect their own health.

Another way the Ford government uses denial to attack workers is their irresponsible schools policy. As of Family Day weekend, Ontario’s daily COVID case rate had dipped below 1000, but still had far to go before we reached the steady state of last summer of 20-40 daily new cases. Yet schools in two of the worst-hit regions, Toronto and Peel, reopen at the end of Family Day Weekend.

Ontario’s Education Minister Stephen Lecce is actually a more genuine practitioner of aggressive denial than Premier Ford. His public communications on schools policy since the pandemic began have consistently blamed teacher behaviour and uncooperative education sector unions for COVID outbreaks in schools. He even forces further unnecessary sacrifices from teachers and school staff by cancelling the March break to make up for class time lost protecting people from the virus.

The absurdities of Lecce’s back-to-school announcement would be hilarious if they weren’t also going to provoke actual fatal casualties. Consider that, in response to questions about community spread through schools, Lecce denied that there was any significant COVID spread in schools, because COVID spreads in communities and schools are not themselves communities.

While in-person schools can run safely under the COVID pandemic, such safety requires serious work, which other regions of Ontario have managed far better than Toronto and Peel. One of the last major outbreaks in metro Toronto before the province-wide lockdown was in an East York elementary school. At the time, Toronto was already under the same lockdown rules as the entire province is now, but schools were still open.

Other provinces, no matter their overall COVID status, still suffer outbreaks in schools. Alberta, also led by conservative ideologues which has let COVID escape control, have suffered a string of school outbreaks. Alberta’s situation shows that the more contagious new variants of COVID appear quite well-suited to spread in schools.

In Newfoundland and Labrador, a province that had eradicated community COVID spread for months, suffered an outbreak at a high school just outside the capitol St. John’s. This single outbreak has already infected, as of my writing, about 200 people, more than 100 of which are under 20.

Anti-Vaxx: The Underlying Ideology of Ontario’s Tories

But there is another ideological element in the attitudes of Ford and the other leaders of his government, which threatens lives from COVID. To see it, we must shift our view from the policies and public relations of the government itself, toward the society they live in.

Consider the beliefs that Doug Ford, his cabinet, the Tory caucus, and conservative activists are all exposed to in their everyday lives. What do their families talk about around their dinner tables? What do they discuss with their regular video conference friends? What Facebook groups do they join and comment in? Who are their influencers?

Consider, for one very noteworthy example, influences in Doug Ford’s own family – including one actual influencer. His daughter Kyla is a fitness and wellness influencer whose Instagram, The Lean Queen, promotes the sport of bodybuilding and health food products, including her own cookie line.

Kyla Ford’s recent turn to promote rejecting masks and resisting vaccines expresses perfectly the anti-vaxx ideology that has come to dominate wellness and fitness culture. This way of thinking is conspiratorially suspicious of medical science, having begun with the popular uptake of Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent 1998 paper that claimed the measles vaccine caused autism in children.

Online communities of largely affluent mothers formed the first core of this community, and the entire modern health and wellness industry caters to their beliefs, reinforcing this anti-scientific ideology in their everyday marketing. You can find out more from such health celebrities as Mehmet Oz, alongside many others who appear regularly on the most popular American morning shows like Oprah and Ellen. Oz is one major wellness industry figure who has minimized the dangers of COVID, especially in schools. The products, regularly revealed as fraudulent and ineffective, promoted by these celebrity wellness advisors appear on platforms like Goop, the alternative medicine hub that is now the primary business of Academy Award winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow.

Anti-Vaxx Is an Ideology that Can Turn a Progressive Fascist

Central to the ideology is the notion that mainstream science, especially the medical and pharmaceutical industry, is under control of corporate oligarchies who prefer to profit from human sickness rather than cure disease. The difficult part is that we progressives understand this as basically correct. It’s a genuine challenge to trust the companies who over-prescribed anti-depressants to inflate profit, literally turbo-charged the opiate epidemic, and exploits poor and politically disenfranchised African populations for medical trials to save the world from COVID.

Anti-vaxx ideology takes this genuine and necessary critique of the pharmaceutical industry and delegitimizes the entire framework of medical science. The pro-‘natural’ wellness industry political program includes advocacy against GMO foods, for faddish diets like non-celiac gluten-free, Atkins, some more militant veganisms, and the Lion Diet. Until recently, anti-vaxx ideology was largely a problematic part of progressive coalitions: environmental activism attracts anti-science conspiracists, agribusiness activism attracts natural food extremists opposed even to millennia-old animal husbandry.

Lending progressive critiques of science more credence is the imperialist history of Western science. Throughout the colonial era, Indigenous and non-Western medical sciences were denounced and devalued in favour of techno-scientific absolutism. Here was another justification to destroy those cultures in the name of uplifting them to the supposedly higher truths of Western knowledge. Even vaccine suspicion has one basis that is friendly to progressives, the long history in America of experimenting on Black populations, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study having been only the most notorious of many examples.

Right-wing and corporate actors have been encouraging suspicion and conspiracy mongering about scientific institutions and knowledge for decades already, since oil industry messaging assaulting climate change science often strikes broadsides against practically every university that grants B.Sc.’s. But vaccine denial got one of its biggest boosts from Donald Trump, who had tweeted many times, even before he became President, to endorse anti-vaccination campaigns and ideas.

But QAnon is the biggest contemporary driver of anti-vaxx ideology on the right today, fitting seamlessly into the conspiracy of a deep state cabal controlling the population through mass medical intervention. Suspicion of vaccines is now so popular, that more than a third of people in the United States have said they won’t themselves get a COVID vaccine. That huge non-immunized minority is an epidemiological worst case scenario: enough unvaccinated for the virus to spread catastrophically through society, so constantly developing resistance in encounters with the vaccinated, and never enough people vaccinated to snuff outbreaks before it can mutate.

An Anti-Worker and Anti-Science Ideology

As far-right conspiracies have taken up anti-vaxx ideology, the privileged culture of so many who make their living in the wellness industry have fit seamlessly in Ontario’s conservatism. The anti-vaccine, anti-mask, and anti-lockdown movements have been able to build coalitions that fight any COVID-related regulation to protect public health. While their policies do at least acknowledge the existence and nature of the virus, unlike Premier Ford’s youngest daughter who seems to think healthy lifestyles and vitamin supplements prevent COVID, anti-science is as much part of the ideas shaping their social worlds as the opposition to unions and workers’ rights.

It all makes for a highly dangerous coalition of ideologies and ideas for the people of Ontario. Lies, ignorance, hostility, and corruption all seem to have more influence on the leaders of the province than the responsibility to protect the people.

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