The price of fear (Part 3, Canadian edition)
Anti-Trump feeling and the strong Canadian preference for social cohesion meant lockdown and vaccine skeptics north of the border faced off-the-charts pressure.
(Third in a series)
Last month, I asked your for first-person stories of the way Covid and vaccine restrictions changed your lives. One subset was particularly striking - those from readers in Canada. Australia may have had stricter rules, but I’m not sure any democratic country did more to ostracize citizens who dared to question its Covid responses.
As these emails show, Canada’s response to Covid quickly tied into the country’s complicated feelings about the United States and Donald Trump. Canadians disliked Trump even before Covid. In a January 2020 survey, only 28 percent said they trusted him to do the right thing, a lower percentage than people in Japan, Britain, Australia, or even Italy.
So once Trump’s handling of Covid became a central controversy in the epidemic, support for strict countermeasures became the norm in Canada. And Canadians pride themselves on being nicer, fairer, and less partisan than Americans. As a Canadian immigration group proclaims, Canadians value equality, respect, safety, peace, nature - and we love our hockey! (Way to roll with the stereotype!)
But that admirable ethos comes with a dark side - an unwillingness to stand up to authority and a passive-aggressive shunning of those who do. This is the right thing to do, and who are you to say it isn’t?
(For glowing *vaccinated* hearts. They don’t mean myocarditis, right?)
Canada banned Covid unvaccinated people from air travel long after it was clear both that airplanes were not a major transmission vector for Covid and that vaccines did nothing to stop transmission. Hard not to see that policy as anything other than punitive, a way to hurt people who had chosen not to be jabbed. The response to the trucker protests this winter was similarly over-the-top.
And the viciousness didn’t stop with the government. As the stories below make clear, employers and families ostracized anyone who spoke out or wouldn’t follow the rules.
(PAYWALLED FOR 72 HOURS)
