3 hours Ago By Murray Mandryk
Article content COVID-19 changed everything in politics. Things have changed so much that it’s now hard to remember that brief, shining moment five years ago when a pandemic somewhat brought us together. It produced too many bad things that are clogging the memory.
Were it not for COVID-19, we wouldn’t have had the anti-vaccination/restriction faction that started with protests and the truckers’ Freedom Convoy. Their sentiments would eventually blend into today’s worldwide right-wing political movement that — in this age of social media silos — has become one side of our great political divide. When COVID-19 subsided, the movement shifted to other matters like opposing preferred pronoun usage in schools or the rights of LGBTQ2S+ adults and kids.
Being anti-woke became as fashionable as being anti-science and anti-public health. South of us, the post-COVID effects have been even more profound. Having forgotten President Donald Trump’s first-term bungling of COVID-19 — including nonsense notions like using Ivermectin and bleach as treatments — disillusioned U.
S. voters soundly rejected Democrats they blamed for the post-COVID-19 inflation that has certainly hammered us all. Now, we face a U.
S. president clamouring for a new world order that would make Canada the 51st state. Here at home, Premier Scott Moe may be remembered as the leader most eager to placate the COVID-19 discontent, becoming the first to end public health restrictions — even as his health officials pleaded with him that it wasn’t yet safe to do so.
While home for Christmas in Shellbrook in 2021, Moe claimed to have had “honest conversations ” with friends and family telling him they were “willing to live with the risks.” We have been divided and angry ever since. So maybe let’s not forget that fleeting time five years ago when we realized we were all in this together and demonstrated we did have the capacity to be better.
The news headlines on March 13, 2020 included “COVID-19 reaches Saskatchewan” and “Don’t let fears drive actions, psychology professor says.” “This is ..
. an important one for all of us,” Moe replied, when asked by then-Leader-Post reporter Arthur White-Crummey on March 19, 2020, about the gravity of his decisions the day the legislature was closed and the annual budget was reduced to an expenditure statement. “It’s not only me but it’s (important for) each one of us here in Saskatchewan.
” It remains one of Moe’s best moments in politics to this day. Reality had hit home for a premier who had been contemplating an early election call to “get ahead of the pandemic” — a nonsense notion, given that chief medical health officer Dr. Saqib Shahab was already calling for an end to public gatherings.
But with deaths meticulously recorded on the government’s dashboard mounting, Moe initially yielded to the guidance of Shahab and the Saskatchewan Health Authority. The premier issued proclamations we stay six feet apart, wear masks, close restaurant dining and public gatherings of all sorts. “I wake up each and every morning waiting for the numbers, just praying there isn’t a death today,” Moe said on April 8, 2020 at one of his many press conferences he would hold with Shahab by his side — sometimes having to defend him from rally racists and anti-vaccination thugs who stalked him.
But five years ago, most of sensed we were in this together. “For the first time Monday, there was a sincere recognition we are in a hell of a deep hole and we will need to work together to climb out,” this columnist wrote in this space on March 18, 2020 — two days after the government announced the closure of schools, casinos and that visits to nursing homes were restricted to compassionate ones. “Will this approach survive? Will we return to the usual squabbling and finger-pointing? Who knows? .
.. (But) let’s encourage this new-found quiet reason for however long it lasts.
It’s what we need in these troubled times.” We were all in this together..
. until we weren’t. The COVID-19 backlash would kick open the doors to today’s world, even less grounded and even more divided.
COVID-19 changed everything. Mandryk is the political columnist for the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. Our websites are your destination for up-to-the-minute Saskatchewan news, so make sure to bookmark thestarphoenix.
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