Laura Rosen Cohen
brownstone.org
Laura Rosen Cohen is a Toronto writer. Her work has been featured in The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, National Post, The Jerusalem Post, The Jerusalem Report, The Canadian Jewish News and Newsweek among others. She is a special needs parent and also a columnist and the official In House Jewish Mother of internationally best-selling author Mark Steyn at SteynOnline.com
Inspired and ghoulishly fulfilled by the draconian lockdown policies of communist China, the province of Ontario, led by “Progressive Conservative” Doug Ford, remains one of the most locked down jurisdictions in the entire world with the added distinction of its children having been robbed of the most school days in all of Canada.
In total, Ontario schools have been shuttered for a total of about 28 weeks (or 140 days) since the onset of the pandemic, longer than any other province in Canada. They have faced the “cruel, ridiculous reality of ‘virtual learning” longer than any other children in this country and indeed, much of the Western world.
Ontario’s children are the victims of abuse. Under any other circumstances, what Ontario’s children are experiencing would be investigated by our police as child abuse.
The children of Ontario are victims of nearly two solid years of psychologically and emotionally damaging messages emanating from public health officials and social media celebrity doctors about how dangerous they are to the people they love; that they are dirty disease carriers, that they could be ‘granny killers’ and inadvertently pass along a deadly virus to their loved ones. They could murder their grandparents! In turn, many Ontario parents have been rendered so utterly terrified about the exaggerated risks to their children from Covid-19 that they are now fully convinced that all children are a health risk to others.
Because of the non-stop, relentless public health propaganda, these parents have no capacity to distinguish levels of risk with respect to this particular illness. As a result, many groups of highly vocal and hysterical parents here in Ontario continue to make ludicrous and fantastical demands of school administrators as they demand 100% Covid risk-free school environments for their children. They are not a majority, but they scream the loudest and suck up all the oxygen in the educational “room.” They set the tone and demand more rules and stringency, and teachers’ unions are only too happy to oblige and indulge this horrific and unnecessary anti-child folie à deux.
Ontario’s children are, by any objective standards, victims of abuse at the hands of our various Ontario public teachers’ unions, which are undoubtedly one of the most powerful political forces in this province. The public unions, in turn, quietly influence the policies of our private schools. These powerful unions repeatedly shift the goalposts for returning to normalcy in school. They refuse to ever conclusively define what a “safe” return to school means, by what measures complete “safety” can be achieved, or even what “safety” actually is.
Our children are victims of Ontario’s morally bankrupt and crumbling socialized medical system, and the bloated, overpaid non-medical hospital administrators who have now convinced our elected officials that the risk of large numbers of children getting Covid-19, then passing along the virus to adults, will cause the collapse of our already crumbling healthcare system.
Socialized medicine, currently consuming almost 40% of Ontario’s GDP, is of course one of Canada’s most robust and plump sacred cows. In practice, it’s a kind of medical Ponzi scheme with subsequent Ontario governments of the left and of the right just kicking the can forward, trying to stave off going over the cliff. Now our children are a convenient and current scapegoat for the fiscal impossibility of administering the highest standard of care to every one of Ontario’s nearly fifteen million citizens equally. The reality of Ontario’s health care is rationed care (“wait lists”), hallway medicine, dramatic understaffing and comically bloated administrative bureaucracies.
Ontario is stuck in March 2020, despite it being January 2022.
What does this mean in practice? It means that nearly two years into the “two weeks to flatten the curve” lie, and despite a remarkable uptake in vaccination among Ontario adults and children, Ontario schoolchildren from kindergarten (in most jurisdictions) right through to Grade 12 are still being forced to wear masks in school and the cowardly, union-pandering government of Doug Ford has not set a date to remove the provincial indoor public space and school mask mandate.
What is “the science” behind masking children who are low-risk for Covid, attending school with double, or triple-vaccinated teachers who are themselves masked as well? And if one believes in the efficacy of vaccines, why are masks even necessary at all this point? What is the “science” that (when ever so rarely not in lockdown) enables adults to eat unmasked in restaurants or exercise without masks in gyms but requires children to be masked for upwards of six hours a day? If adults can have drinks in restaurants, children can be free of masks – the sinister holy talisman of the Religion of Covid.
Obviously, masks are not necessary. They are part of the current genre of safety kabuki theatre. Of course, anyone who chooses to wear a mask in a free society should be able to do so if they wish. But mandating masks on children is nothing more than a punitive and sadistic sign of submission to the deep-seated and perhaps irreparable hypochondria of sincerely troubled adults. At this point, it’s pathological.
Here in Ontario, the sadism toward children on the part of educators is now going beyond the mask mandates. Parents from across the province are reporting “no mask, no voice” policies, made up by individual teachers and school boards. They are inventing “safety” rules that even Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health did not develop and does not condone. They are going rogue – on children.
Children in Ontario schools are told not to speak to their friends during lunch, or are told they must have breaks in Canada’s sub-freezing temperatures outside, bathroom visits are limited and not based on biological needs. Hugging and singing are forbidden. Students have had masks taped to their faces. “No hard breathing” in gym class is demanded. Proms, graduations, sports, lunch programs, extracurricular activities, field trips, and grad trips have been canceled. Childhood joy has been canceled by adults in Ontario. It’s unforgivable and it has to stop. Now.
Growing numbers of Ontario teachers, many of whom are tireless advocates for children and for normalcy, are testifying to the cruelty faced by their young charges. They feel powerless, but they know one thing. The kids are not alright.
While unmasked, normal life returns to Great Britain, Scotland and Ireland, and while normal life in red state America was never interrupted, Ontario under Doug Ford remains paralyzed in terror of the necessary and critical return to normal life. The government of Ontario remains wedded to policies that have simply inflicted the maximum human carnage imaginable whether by good intent or malice. But as Bari Weiss recently put it, as in blue states in America, we here in Ontario are trapped in a “pandemic of bureaucracy” to be “remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic moral crime.“
We have lived under the capricious rules of Ontario’s biomedical tyranny for almost two years. At this point, the question of malice is legitimate. In preparing my thoughts for this indictment of the Ford government, I asked on Twitter for Ontarians to remind me of the cruelest, most arbitrary, inhumane and particularly imbecilic policies that were imposed upon us throughout the last two years – many of which are still in practice to this very moment.
As a writer with a moderate public presence, people reach out to me quite frequently on various issues. The stories that I have been told of pandemic rule-related sadism are simply crimes against humanity. I try to encourage and console them as much as possible, but I am just one person. I’ve been fighting and triaging for almost two years, and yet, here we are still. Children have been treated with wanton cruelty, but so has the rest of the populace here as well.
These are but some of the cruelties inflicted upon the people of Ontario by the Ford government; I don’t have the space or the emotional fortitude to make an even more comprehensive summary but they will be illustrative.
Children and Sports:
In Ontario, parents were encouraged to isolate their very young children if they had Covid. Recreation centres have been closed and extra extracurricular sports canceled. Despite there being no provincial requirement, some recreational centres and sports were only opened to double-vaccinated children from ages 12-17. Despite their very low risk from Covid and knowing that the vaccines do not stop transmission, a major push is now underway to vaccinate the 5-11 year-old cohort.
This is not based on any actual risk to kids, but rather on the fears of adults. Playgrounds were taped off. Park benches taped off. Citizens were fined for sitting in parks and for walking in parks – at times alone. Basketball nets taped up with plastic bags rendering them unusable. Municipal employees in my own city patrolled city parks looking for people walking in groups and demanded to know who you were with, why, and if you were of the same households. Skating rinks were sanded, and hockey nets taped up. Forced masking has caused speech delays, communication disorders, psychological and behavioural problems in thousands of children. Children were masked at summer camp outdoors, while maskless Toronto Mayor John pranced about in front of them.
The Elderly:
Residents of government-run long-term care homes were forced to stay in their rooms for weeks and months at a time and denied visits from their loved ones. They were left alone soiled, hungry and lonely as well. The most frail and vulnerable among us were isolated, our mentally incapacitated loved ones were wished happy birthday through windows. They were forced to die alone in hospitals. Vaccination was made mandatory. One Ontario nursing home removed the doors to residents’ rooms in order to keep them isolated. Given the number of Covid deaths at government-run nursing homes, one could reasonably argue that the Ontario government is, in fact, responsible for the highest number of Covid deaths in this province.
Hospitals and health:
Ontario hospitals forced many frightened, sad and frail humans to die alone in their hospital rooms as visitors were forbidden – for their health of course. Unvaccinated individuals are still not allowed to visit their loved ones and are not offered a testing option. “Nonessential” surgeries, tests and procedures have been canceled by the thousands. Cancers have gone undiagnosed, surgeries postponed indefinitely. Physicians not toeing the line on vaccines and granting vaccine exemptions (which are near impossible to obtain) have been investigated by the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons. And now, Ontario’s ghoulish Minister of Health, Christine Elliot is taking things even a notch further.
“Essential” workers, “essential” purchasing.
Many working humans were deemed unessential; and forced to stay home. This is a dehumanizing policy truly beneath any allegedly civilized country. Ontario stores taped off “nonessential” items. The Ontario government forbade citizens from purchasing consumer items of their choice. Relentless “Stay At Home” orders screamed through our cell phones. I won’t even begin to get into the current Canadian “othering” of the unvaccinated, the disgraceful dehumanization of humans solely because they are making a medical choice of their own – for whatever reason they choose.
General sadism and ridiculousness.
Depriving disabled children of visits from their family for their safety of course. Refusing disabled children entry to retail stores despite their exemptions. Singing and dancing – banned. If music is played, then “..volume should be reduced in order to not encourage loud talking, singing or shouting” because the virus understands volume settings and certainly understands alcohol service hours. Also, no drinking coffee standing up – because obviously that makes one particularly vulnerable to a virus.
In summary, I’m done with it. Done with Covid.
Ontarians, and most especially our children, need a life that is nothing less than normal.
If Premier Doug Ford refuses to pivot to normal instantaneously, along the lines of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, he needs to step aside and resign in his full disgrace, preferably before he and his incredibly tyrannical government are inevitably politically pummeled in our upcoming June 2022 provincial elections.
I’m weary.
Ontario has tried to wear us all down and beat us all into cowed submission on every issue that matters. The Canadian media, subsidized by the federal government to the maximum, generally has a policy of Omertà on good news about the virus. There is no coverage of the fact that we are heading into the endemic phase, no mainstream coverage about how the virus is mostly survivable and particularly not dangerous to children, and certainly zero coverage of the fact that many countries have now abandoned all of their Covid restrictions and are back to life, and back to 2019 so to speak.
I will continue to fight with every ounce of strength I have until what has been stolen from us is returned. We are many and we will win. Nothing less than normal. Now.
No more masks. No more rules. No more tyranny. No more waiting.
Normal life now, Premier Ford!
