Days after Ontario premier Doug Ford put on a dog and pony show of consulting scientists, health experts and educators about whether to re-open schools for in-person learning for the remainder of the school year, demanding consensus, Ford declared yesterday that he was going to cancel those classes – but he wanted all grades to have an outdoor graduation at the end of the year. This genius suggestion apparently came from a letter he got from a child, and he immediately headed to said child’s home to discuss it. That’s right, Ontario – not only is this province run by incompetent and unethical murderclowns, but they’re taking policy suggestions from literal children.

He also said schools can't be open because "we don't have enough teachers vaccinated."

He's uniquely responsible for getting teachers vaccinated.

— Justin Ling (Has Left) (@Justin_Ling) June 2, 2021

Pouring salt into the wound, Ford is now trying to push up his re-opening dates for the economy, immediately contradicting his handwringing that schools are too unsafe because of the variants of concern in the community, but those very same variants would be as much a threat to other businesses re-opening, so it’s neither credible nor cogent. And even if we’ve got good vaccination numbers, the hospitalisation and ICU numbers are still way too high to consider any kind of re-opening, or we’ll just repeat the same pattern we did with the previous two waves of this gods damned pandemic. But hey, he wants people to have a beer on a patio.

This is what underlies all of these false dichotomies: schools or the economy? Open schools or keep teachers safe? Protect hospitals or businesses? If you make poor decisions, then those terrible trade-offs become necessary. But it was a CHOICE to make it that way.

— Shannon Proudfoot (@sproudfoot) June 2, 2021

It’s going to be a hell of a thing if in two weeks patios are roaring, cases are in the basement and kids are still at home suffering while they and their parents slowly drown. When this was necessary, it was brutally hard, but now it just seems like arbitrary punishment.

— Shannon Proudfoot (@sproudfoot) June 2, 2021

This is the thing: prioritizing the economy above all else is absolutely a decision you can make as a government. But even by that metric, the Ontario response has been a clanging failure. You do late, weak lockdowns, guess what you get? More lockdowns. This was a choice. https://t.co/ehF0bbZK85

— Shannon Proudfoot (@sproudfoot) June 2, 2021

And we need to keep this in mind, especially when it comes time to hold Ford to account at the ballot box – he made these choices throughout the pandemic to delay, to take half-measures, to not make schools safe, to do simply try to blame-shift rather than act on areas that are under his responsibility, to sit on federal funds rather than spending them immediately and effectively to do things like expanding testing and tracing, and the economy wasn’t any better off as a result. It’s on him, as these were his choices.

Good reads:

• Both Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland say that Air Canada needs to explain itself for why it paid out bonuses to executives while negotiating a bail-out.
• Two Indigenous-led centres related to the TRC want a national framework to protect and investigate other potential burial sites at former residential schools.
• While forensic examination of the Kamloops mass grave could provide clues as to how the children died, the existence of these grave sites were never really secret.
• Here is a look at how few prosecutions and convictions were made following abuses in residential schools, and the Catholic Church has yet to offer a formal apology.
• The federal government will (finally) release their national action plan in response to the MMIW Inquiry report today.
• Mark Miller says he’s not in favour of taking down statues of Sir John A Macdonald, but would rather they spur deeper conversations into the darker parts of history.
• Mélanie Joly says that she offered money to help maintain Laurentian University’s French-language programmes, but the Ontario government didn’t respond.
• Canada is doubling its monetary contributions to COVAX, but doesn’t currently have excess vaccine doses that they can donate to redistribute.
• RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki has rejected the idea of bringing in a special prosecutor to look into the claims of women assaulted by colleagues on the Force.
• 105 First Nations have signed onto a class-action lawsuit seeking reparations for the loss of their language and culture, but the federal government is denying culpability.
• The Privacy Commissioner raised a number of concerns on the Senate public bill that would force age-verification by ISPs for any consumption of porn.
• The majority of Conservative MPs voted in favour of a bill to ban sex-selective abortions, though the bill was ultimately defeated by all other parties.
• The Conservatives are trying to make a privilege issue out of demanding unredacted documents on the firing of the two scientists from the National Microbiology Lab.
• Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column reviews the latest fundraising appeals by the various parties, which is back in full swing. Nature is healing, etc.
• Senator Paula Simons explains the problems with Bill S-225, which purports to use the Copyright Act to force web giants to pay news outlets.
• Kevin Carmichael looks over the GDP figures which were weaker than expected – propped up by housing – and why it signals that stimulus may still be necessary.
• Susan Delacourt examines the “middle road” approach the government is taking to reconciliation and history, which may be the most treacherous path there is.

Odds and ends:

For Xtra, I wrote about the Conservative plans to spend Pride Month going after the blood donation deferral policy, and dying on the smallest hill they could find.

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