Covid Response: The Price Paid

You were wondering - well, the thoughtful among you - what the price tag ultimately would be for the unscientific, unethical and hysterical Covid response.

In addition to a landscape littered with broken, families, shuttered businesses, regressed education, neurotic kids, higher suicides and anxiety, more poverty and hunger, spouse and child abuse, inflation, record excess deaths etc. we can now add freedom to the mix.

The idea a commission could find a way to excuse the government for crushing dissent is something I never thought possible in Canada. 

It only goes to show we've been living in a facade and a fraud.

If all it takes is a virus with a 99.985% survival rate and truckers honking to undermine freedom and democracy then it doesn't say much for our values and institutions now does it?

I don't care that we vote and had a hearing. Dictatorships have elections and kangaroo hearings too.

We just happen to have better furniture and more refined rhetoric in masking our 'commitment' to democracy.

The Canadian people, ultimately, are to be blamed here. The country simply doesn't grasp what just happened.

It's so bad it is garnering attention from other Western nations.

Canada always craves to be noticed. To be the voice of reason and a beacon of light to nations for democracy. 

Ironically, we're getting the attention we wish for. And for a thin-skinned society like Canada, they may not like having become not a leader of democracy but a cautionary tale for other democracies to not follow. 

Only not in the way we would want.

We're getting attention for all the wrong reasons.

And justifiably so.

Canada: The first Western nation to conclude it's ok for the government to crush protests.

Rouleau may have been 'reluctant' and indeed didn't sound too convincing (in true Canadian fashion since we're always straddling the mythical line of 'balance') but he ultimately bet on the wrong horse and made the wrong decision.

Spectacularly wrong decision.

One in which we will need to fix.

Fast.

Or else our slow descent into authoritarianism has now become a brisk march.