At the beginning of this pandemic, I wrote about the moral dilemma politicians faced, choosing between lives and livelihoods. Theirs was the task of shaping public policy in the face of science and modelling to directly protect lives, I wrote, but also to recognize that the economy was a public health issue too.
What I didn’t spend any time on in that early article is now emerging as the key issue facing our politicians, laid bare for all to see by the occupation of the country’s capital city by protesting Canadians.
That issue is the balance between individual freedom and community security. This is always the crux of government, but in most circumstances, it is obscured by a web of compromises and trade-offs, arguments about whether services should be privately or publicly provided, about how much the free market should be allowed to function untrammelled and how much regulation and welfare is needed to ensure it is sustainable and to smooth out the impact of its cycles on society.
The individual and society. Freedom versus security. This is the dynamic tension that underlies every policy decision government makes. Democracy, where government acts with the consent of the governed, is the best solution we have found to negotiating this balance. Its very inefficiency and messiness make it flexible and self-correcting when it errs too far in one direction, in the view of the governed.
Another way of describing the continuum between freedom and security is on the left vs. right political spectrum, with the left leaning towards security and the right towards freedom, and the vast majority of Canadians clustered around the middle.
One of the greatest virtues of democracies like ours is their ability to accommodate a range of views, and to ensure that the tyranny of a majority does not crush conflicting minority opinions or groups. The current protest in Ottawa results from a sense that majority community positions as expressed by government regulation are going too far, that freedom is being sacrificed for security, that the majority is riding roughshod over the minority. The government, the protesters say, has got the individual versus society balance wrong, the pendulum of freedom versus security, it is implied, has swung too far in the direction of safety.
It is true that some elements of the protest are extremist libertarians, on the far right of the political spectrum, wavers of racist flags, defacers of the monuments to those who defended the democracy that is the protector of the very freedom they claim to cherish. Full of contradictions, these individuals are terrorizing Ottawa, reportedly defacing the statue of the selfless Terry Fox and urinating on the tomb of the unknown soldier. The Good Shepherd Mission has been unable to provide the homeless with meals and shelter as these elements have blocked the roads their volunteers need to reach the mission. To add insult to injury the mission has been inundated with demands for meals from the very people who are impeding their work. These are but a few examples of the destructiveness of some who have seized upon this opportunity to promote their deeply repugnant beliefs.
No one should be negotiating with these protesters, and the Prime Minister’s characterization of them is entirely accurate. But Prime Minister Trudeau has unfairly lumped in the many other law-abiding Canadians who feel there is something wrong with where we are in this pandemic, who have a sense that security is in danger of eroding liberty, and that the government has got the balance wrong. It is ironic that the trigger for this feeling to turn to protest was the trucker border crossing vaccine mandate, which is meaningless given the US has the same rule, but regardless of its origins, the feeling is a valid one.
Judging by the numbers who came out to show their support in Oakville, where the protest convoy did not even appear, many of our neighbours and friends are feeling uneasy about the degree of intrusion of government into our lives, and about the wisdom of some of the decisions imposed on us. Many more than those who turned out, and who are fully vaccinated and have been fully compliant with all the rules and recommendations, are beginning to believe it is time for the emergency to be declared over and the responsibility returned to the governed.
In my article at the beginning of the pandemic, I emphasized that science and modelling should be informing government, but that the decisions to be made involved balancing moral issues, issues of principle that will have consequences long after we have accommodated ourselves to whatever remains of this plague. These decisions must be made by politicians, by our elected leaders.
In the beginning, buying time for vaccines and cures, those decisions had to be aimed at preserving hospital capacity and saving lives. Science has done its best now, and the state of emergency restrictions on freedom in the name of security cannot continue much longer. Our leaders need to own the responsibility they have to find a new balance and stop using “the science” as an excuse to oversimplify and overregulate.
I am three times vaccinated, and now a survivor of Covid-19 contracted well after the third vaccination. Our freedoms come with risks and responsibilities. Within the limits of ensuring hospitals are only rarely prevented from doing the many procedures they have postponed during this pandemic it is time for government to return the responsibility for managing our own risks to us.
What might that look like? Well for one thing it will no longer be one rule for everyone, majority rule. It will look more like the kind of individual accountability that is both the condition for democracy and the freedom democracy best protects.
For the vast majority of the vaccinated, Covid-19 cases are like the flu—even including the fact that the flu claims lives every flu season. Unless I had to, if I had a mild flu I wouldn’t go to work. If I did have to, I would likely have said to my co-workers, “steer clear, I’ve got a bug you don’t want!”. No law would have mandated my behaviour, my judgement and that of those around me would be trusted to balance risk and benefit.
To protect the hospitals, those most likely to end up there if they get Covid, which is to say the unvaccinated, should have their contacts with others limited. Purely recreational optional activities like restaurants, bars and sporting events should not be available to them, unless and until hospital capacity is no longer a constraint. They are free to regain those freedoms by being vaccinated. If they want to pose a greater risk to the healthcare system, it is reasonable they have some restrictions on their ability to burden it. This is no different than smokers paying vast taxes for their freedom to smoke and being severely limited in where they can do it.
The new normal should be to trust us to use our judgement, just as we have been expected to do with the infectious diseases that have been with us for much longer. We all know or can know enough to make our own decisions now. When to go out in crowds, when to wear a mask. We can ask our doctor’s advice on whether to get the next booster, or what extra precautions we should take, both to protect ourselves and to avoid infecting others. Those who are significantly more vulnerable because of pre-existing conditions have developed ways of protecting themselves. Their freedoms will be limited to the extent they are willing to take risks, but the rest of society cannot any longer be restricted to keep them safe. We all know some of these people, and already manage our contacts with them to protect them and will continue to do so without regulation. Where I am currently, in France, home tests are in every supermarket and people are using them to guide their decision-making and protect others.
If, after vaccinations, better treatments, and widespread public awareness, we are still forced to curtail freedoms to protect hospital spaces, then we need more hospital spaces and more trained medical personnel. Providing that will cost us far less than paying people to stay home or dealing with the mental health costs and damage to social cohesion that prolonging constraints on our freedom will create. Freedom has always had a cost, and providing hospital spaces is a much lower cost one than has been paid by generations past.
In the meantime, the support for the trucker convoy is evidence of a genuine widespread malaise. It is about the prolonged imbalance between safety and liberty and is felt more widely than that support indicates. The Prime Minister would do well to respect it and take it into account in responding to this protest, lest he provoke a backlash that leads us to an imbalance in the other direction, from which his opponents will be only too happy to make political hay. Such a development would further divide the country and upset the happy balance of freedom and security Canadians have enjoyed for many decades, under governments of all stripes.
