Skip to main content

Meanwhile, Just Over the Northern Border

The jerk was making a stink over being forced to wear a mask.

No, this was not Alabama or Texas, or even Michigan. It was St. Joseph Island, Ontario — a place I’ve come to most summers of my life. The summer of 2020 most emphatically broke that streak. I didn’t know until three weeks ago if I’d be allowed into Canada even this summer.

The jerk was just ahead of us in a short line, waiting to get into one of the few restaurants on the island to survive the pandemic. The restaurant business isn’t brilliant there, even in the best of times. But we were used to having three or four decent choices on the island.

The jerk was loudly lamenting that lack of choice. He appeared to be in his late thirties, with a wife, two kids, and a bad attitude he was happy to share. In answer to a question I didn’t ask, he assured me that the failure of restaurants on the island was a failure of the government and its anti-business policies. Which was why we were all forced to wait in line.

I considered asking him if he thought Covid might have played a slight role — that maybe having no customers for a year might have been a factor — but I didn’t really want to hear his answer.

My Canadian friends and relatives assured me he was exactly the sort of wingnut we Americans recognize instantly. Idiocy respects no borders.

To this point the subject of masks had not come up. But when he got to the head of the line, he refused to wear one. He was offered one — every business keeps a ready supply — but he turned it down. This prompted the hostess to escalate the complaint to the woman who has owned the restaurant for as long as I can remember, and who accepts no bullshit.

Especially since the government can shut her down if she lets the jerk in. The law is on her side — she can refuse to serve him — but it requires her establishment’s strict compliance with the mask mandate.

From here, the story peters out. The jerk and his family left quietly, and no doubt hungry. But it got me thinking about how the two countries are handling the virus, and what it says about them.

St. Joseph Island is actually a stone’s throw — in places almost literally — from upper Michigan, but the Covid response on each side of that border is noticeably different.

Going into a store on the island is a throwback to March 2020, when we were all deathly afraid, trying to make sense of this virus that had shut our world down. There, every store and restaurant — with one apparently willful exception — now has signage that mandates masks and strict social distancing. Every employee wears a mask full time. There’s the inevitable hand sanitizer just inside the door, and your host will prompt you, with Canadian nice-ness, to use it.

From all reports there has not been a single case of Covid on the island. Not one. Granted, its entire population is less than some apartment buildings in Manhattan, but it’s still striking, in a culture-shock sort of way, how universal the response seems. I assume most people are vaccinated.

It was the same story in Sault Ste. Marie, the nearest city, 25 miles away. I did business in a bank, a bike shop, a Home Depot, and a supermarket — and everyone was masked, including customers. It was expected of everyone, and nobody made a fuss. No further jerks were sighted on this trip.

At home in Michigan, the stupid politics of mandates are wearing people out, and mask-wearing has become much more casual than it should be. Our vaccinations have made us blasé, even as the out-of-control delta variant screams at us to be more careful. We need more mandates, not less — especially for vaccinations — but we pay more attention to fools than is good for us.

On the island — and, if I may generalize, in Canada — the mandates seem mostly wanted and respected.

Of course, St. Joseph Island can’t speak for all of Canada, so I asked my friend Doug, who can, how he accounts for the differences.

He attributes it to a long cultural affinity for collective effort. Canada is a huge land mass with a tiny population, a harsh climate, and an embedded understanding that everyone needs to pull together to make it all work.

He adds that Canadians have little impulse toward rugged individualism or the myth of self-reliance. The self-made tycoon is not widely admired.

If I understand Doug correctly, the Canadian constitution codifies, at least by implication, the ability of the collective to override the individual. Collective imperatives carry more legal weight in Canada than they do in, say, Texas, where self-reliance currently reigns, and where appalling numbers of people are exercising their individual freedom by dying in its name. And taking up valuable hospital beds in the process.

But for Canadians, what this constitutional foundation means in practice is that they are free to overwhelmingly approve and buy into the public health measures imposed by their government. They accept the science, and they trust the doctors, academics, and public health officials who are managing the pandemic response.

So even after a slow start, seventy-two percent of the population is now fully vaccinated. Eighty percent favor mandatory vaccination for the country. And Covid rates are currently manageable, knock wood.

Which is not to say Canada doesn’t have its share of numbskulls, or that distrust of government isn’t on the rise. Even on the island, there was a low hum of discord regarding one store that was ignoring the mask mandate, despite having been reported multiple times. Not to mention that jerk in the restaurant.

Canada has barely one-tenth our population, so it’s hard to compare apples to apples. But I think it’s safe to say that America, as a whole, could clearly use some lessons in the benefits of collective will. If we’d approached Covid with even a fraction of Canada’s attitude toward the public good, the pandemic might well be over by now.

Instead, we keep making stupid mistakes that we seem doomed to repeat.

 

Comments

  1. That was so well written I feel like I could’ve been there!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Report from Los Angeles and San Francisco: these days everyone is required to — and actually does — wear a mask in all businesses (except restaurants and bars while sitting down) without a fuss. Doesn't sound so different.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I feel that we are doing the same in my part of Oregon but obviously not so in southern Oregon where the hospitals are tragically overflowing and the nursing staffs are quitting due to burn out and mistreatment by the folks coming in and dying while still in angry denial about their cause of death!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If You Were Putin, What Would You Do?

  S o let’s say you’re Vladimir Putin. Scary, I know. But let’s just say you’d been trained by the old KGB to hate the United States with a white-hot passion that you’ve had on simmer since long before you became dictator. It’s a hate you were taught in the Brezhnev years, which were almost as bad as Stalin’s but with mass death ruled out, more or less. You nursed the hate through the convulsions of the early nineties, when your beloved Soviet Union was scrapped and replaced with economic chaos and widespread privation, which the Russian people somehow endured, as usual. Then finally, in 2000, you got your shot. You took over the whole country, and your hate was given room to breathe. Still you took your time. Fourteen years till you “annexed” Crimea and moved on the Donbass. Two more years before you engineered Brexit and the self-destruction of the UK, the same year you stole a U.S. presidential election for a pliable con man you’ve owned for three decades...

Chuck Schumer Isn’t Quite the Villain He’s Being Cast As

  E verybody’s pissed off at Chuck Schumer. His handling of last Friday’s continuing resolution (CR) vote has been widely excoriated, and calls for his head have been loud and rude, as befits the times. But even before the actual vote, I was thinking that his very public decision to not filibuster the CR — thereby allowing it to pass — was, in fact, the right one. To be sure, it meant allowing a deeply atrocious bill to become law. The consequences of that bill will need to be addressed, first in court, then in any strategy we can devise to save the country from these repulsive people, but I’ll get back to you on that. In the meantime, Schumer made his decision with eyes wide open. He expected to take heat for it, and he wasn’t disappointed. His reasoning is on the record. He says, I think accurately, that if the government were to be shut down, only “essential personnel” could be called in to work, but that it would be up to the executive branch to decid...

On What Planet is This Good for Business?

  W here’s the upside of all this wanton destruction? Once you intentionally tear down a flawed but quite-workable system, once you reduce it to smoking ruins, once you’ve thrown much of your population into high-stress survival mode, what’s the benefit? And whose benefit is it? As I said last week , the biggest benefit always goes to Putin. But he’s not the only one looking to make the most of the chaos. Closer to home, there are any number of billionaires aspiring to oligarch status, plainly looking for opportunity in this new world order. I’ll use the word ‘oligarch’ as a catch-all for the extravagantly rich and powerful, as well as for the corporate interests they control and the negative influence they exert. Some are household names, but most stay well under the radar. Think of them as today’s Robber Barons. And they will indeed find ways to increase their wealth under the Trump regime. Which apparently, for some profoundly misguided reason, is ...