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Chris Selley: Lockdown-obsessed Ontario sits at the back of the reopening pack

Other cities did considerably better than Toronto in simultaneously fighting the pandemic and in preserving some semblance of normal life for those who wished to partake

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Canada’s largest provinces are all of a sudden launching their reopening plans, as if finally conceding that this vaccination business is the real deal. A pronounced east-west gap is emerging: Alberta’s plan, released Wednesday, suggests nearly all public health measures might be abandoned as early as June 28. British Columbia’s plan, unveiled Tuesday, envisions “normal social contact” and “fully reopened offices and workplaces” in the first week of September. Quebec announced last week it hoped to drop all curfews, and reopen all gyms and restaurants, by the end of the month.

Ontario’s reopening plan, meanwhile, suggests we might be able to go to the library in August. There is no timeline for anything approaching a “return to normal.” (For the record, over the past seven days, Quebec has seen an average of seven daily cases per 100,000 population, B.C. eight, Ontario 13, and Alberta 17. All are on positive trajectories.)

Ontario being Ontario, and the Ontario media being the Ontario media, Ontario’s plan received positive reviews: “Finally, the government gets it!” But for all the useless absurdities Queen’s Park has foisted upon its constituents in the name of “lockdown,” there is no denying it has in some ways been unusually strict.

BBC North America reporter Robin Levinson-King recently crunched the numbers and concluded that Toronto may well have suffered the harshest hospitality-industry lockdown on the planet. “All told, you’ve been unable to sit down to a meal in a Toronto restaurant for just over 360 days,” she reported. “Compare that with Paris (over 260 days), London (259 days) or Hong Kong (two days).”

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It would be intriguing to know how BBC’s international audiences felt reading that. Some might well have thought, “well, maybe that’s why Toronto did so well.” One in nine people living in the greater Paris area have had COVID-19, one in 12 living in the greater London area, and one 20 living in the Greater Toronto Area.

Theoretically, Torontonians might say the same. We are certainly not above boasting: How many articles and news items did you read about Canada’s total per-capita vaccine doses recently exceeding the Americans’, and now ranking third among 37 OECD nations among people with at least one dose? Canada is eighth among OECD nations in fewest COVID-19 cases, and 10th in fewest deaths; if Ontario were an OECD nation, that’s where it would rank as well.

No one boasts about that, and nor should they, considering a huge percentage of deaths could have been prevented if the long-term care home system hadn’t been such a disgrace. But the overwhelmingly dominant media narrative in Upper Canada is that the province did as badly as it did precisely because the government refused to implement “proper” lockdowns. The very idea of allowing people to dine out during a pandemic, even alone on a patio, reduces a good few otherwise reasonable Ontarians to hair-pulling conniption fits.

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It’s not nearly so simple. Other cities did considerably better than Toronto in simultaneously fighting the pandemic and in preserving some semblance of normal life for those who wished to partake — not just in Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and South Korea, but right here in North America.

As of Wednesday, Toronto had 4,900 cases and 121 deaths per 100,000 population. Indoor dining has been closed for almost a full year’s worth of days, and outdoor dining for nearly as many.

Portland, Ore., saw 4,800 cases and 73 deaths per 100,000. Indoor and outdoor dining were closed in the city for just 187 and 109 days, respectively.

Seattle saw 4,800 cases and 69 deaths per 100,000. Indoor and outdoor dining closed for just 160 and 82 days, respectively.

And our very own Vancouver saw just 3,200 cases per 100,000 — by far the best-performing big city in North America. (B.C. doesn’t report deaths by local health area, but province-wide, its death toll is 33 per 100,000. Ontario’s is 59.) By my count, indoor dining has been shut down in Vancouver for just 120 days of the pandemic, and outdoor dining for just 65 days during the initial spring 2020 lockdown.

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Is there something about the Pacific Northwest? Experts have credited Oregonians’ and Washingtonians’ relatively law-abiding temperaments, and governments that took the threat seriously enough to close schools, cancel events and urge employers — including locally based giants like Microsoft and Amazon — to allow work-from-home.

“Everyone, Republicans and Democrats, came together behind one message and agreed to let the scientists take the lead,” Dow Constantine, the Executive of King County (i.e., Seattle) told The New Yorker last year.

“If you have a politician on the stage, there’s a very real risk that half the nation is going to do the opposite of what they say,” Dr. Richard Besser, formerly acting director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, told the magazine. It’s a plausible notion, though several of Canada’s chief public health officers have no business in front of a microphone either.

There are long-term lessons to be learned everywhere, clearly. I don’t pretend to know what they are, but “harsher always works better” is demonstrably not one of them — certainly not if you have a holistic view of public health. In the shorter term, I suspect a lot of the people who applauded Ontario’s tremendously cautious reopening plan will soon find themselves demanding considerably more, considerably faster, as they watch other provinces accept the miracle science has offered us and get safely back to normal.

• Email: cselley@nationalpost.com | Twitter:

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