While some of the memories seem like yesterday, the doors of Listowel’s most famous watering hole, Modeans, have been closed for over a decade. Regardless of whether you were a lone ranger at the bar, dance floor fiend, or resident of the pool table cavern, Modeans was a place where the community gathered starting with Friday lunch hour right up until closing time Saturday night. A place where of course everyone was 19, no one was overserved, and every rule was followed to the letter…
For over a year and a half, we have been fed a steady diet of half truths and faulty promises… just do this a little longer and we will all go back to normal. How many times have we been asked to compromise our own happiness just a little bit more? Today the call is for mandated vaccines and vaccine passports, a move that if strictly enforced will see a decline in personal liberty that less than two years ago only existed in our history books and futuristic dystopian novels.
I am fully vaccinated (in the eyes of Canadian officials, but not the EU or the U.S. which in itself is another debacle), am excited to see how well vaccines are responding and yet am floored that in spite of global leadership on vaccine rates here in Canada, the pearl clutching COVID zealots are demanding a further cessation of personal liberty. Segregating society on the grounds of a personal health choice would be wrong in normal circumstances… segregating society by dehumanizing those who are hesitant to receive a relatively new technology in which governments have removed all liability from the pharmaceutical industry that is raking in billions of profits from the manufacture of said new technology is downright immoral.
Beyond the moral folly of a segregated approach is the ill conceived idea that everyone will fall in line with a valid passport. As a person born in 1984, all it took was a needle and some nail polish to turn an old driver’s license into my passport for entry into Modeans as a person proudly born in 1981. Times have changed and the digital nature of our world means falsifying a passport with a needle and nail polish may not work, but it is folly to think that the black market won’t serve up a workable passport to those who really do not want to get vaccinated and have the means to pay.
A public health crisis like COVID-19 cannot be crushed with the hard hand of authority, it is only through collaboration and compromise that such a polarized issue can be properly mitigated. If a person puts themselves in the shoes of a hesitant person, what information is out there right now that calms their fears? Instead of headlines praising how well vaccines are working, we continue to be bombarded with fear mongering and doomsday predictions. A person skeptical of whether the vaccine is the right health choice for their own health only has to sign on to the CBC to be confronted with messaging that implies there is no point.
It is foolhardy to think that vaccine passports will make a significant impact at this point as it ignores the current high rate of vaccination and the basics of human nature. Will a passport system be the final piece of motivation that gets a few more needles in arms? Yes it will. Will the draconian nature of the effort to drive compliance create more extremism among those most hesitant, a phenomenon far more dangerous to the long-term health of our society than COVID itself? Yes it will.
In a world dependent on rules and regulations to seemingly function, we have forgotten a critical success factor for real prosperity. The right of self determination is an integral piece for the individual to realize their full potential in a healthy society. People have to want something to truly embrace it, to truly work for it and government mandates are the opposite approach. Government can be nothing more than a facilitator if it is to be successful. When it becomes a dictator of personal choice, it hastens the erosion of public trust, weakens societal order and ultimately causes undue suffering for all.
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Stewart Skinner is a local business owner, former political candidate, and has worked at Queen’s Park as a Policy Advisor to the Minister of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs. He can be reached at stewart@stonaleenfarms.ca or on Twitter: @modernfarmer.
