What Can I Do to Help?

Like many Ontarians, I have watched Premier Doug Ford hold multiple press conferences to deliver grim news in this our purgatory of COVID. Like many Ontarians, I’ve applauded the man’s stamina, humility, guts, and forthrightness.

Perfect? No, he’s as human as you or me. Might you or I have said and done things differently? Perhaps sometimes, but I’m grateful that it was him, not me, on the hot seat.

Regretfully, not everyone in the press corps sees things that way. As soon as the announcements end and the questions begin, a pack of preppy little press puppies begin biting the Premier’s ankles. Like those smart-ass high school kids who made a career of trying to trip up the teacher, this gaggle of wannabe investigative reporters fires one gotcha question after another at the Premier, pointing out some discrepancy or policy change, and pressing the Premier to admit that he is stupid, shifty, or incompetent.

Now, to be completely transparent, I am no Tory, and I didn’t vote for Doug Ford. Nor do I think that Ontario has done everything perfectly in the COVID war. But let’s be fair– like every other political leader in the world, Doug Ford was handed a crisis which has lasted longer and been deeper than anyone imagined, and for which there was neither precedent nor playbook.

With a responsibility to keep the economy running so that we all get to eat and keep warm, his choices and options are not quite as cut and dried as the sophomores pretend. He has treated the pandemic like the serious, complicated crisis it is, and he deserves some slack.

Like nearly all our Premiers, Mr. Ford has listened to his experts and tried to balance as best he could between health and economics. He has been earnest, open, frank, and time and again he has implored Ontarians to exercise common sense and self-control in the face of selfish yahoos who believe COVID is a hoax to strip them of their civil liberties.

Moreover, two of the most potent factors for managing the pandemic are beyond his control: Ontario gets only the vaccines that the Feds allot us, and literally millions of potential carriers of variants continue monthly to fly through Pearson, a Federal jurisdiction. Ford’s magic wand is not quite as long as the ankle-biters imagine.

There’s no amount of money or public adulation which would make me trade places with Premier Doug Ford. In my view, it’s time for the preppy ankle-biter pressers to grow up, stop the “gotcha games”, and instead, on behalf of all of us, ask this question: “What can I do to help?”