TORONTO – The third wave of the pandemic has laid bare the fragility of the provincial government. In the last two weeks, all those fundamental critical issues and contradictions have emerged that during the first and second waves had been partially hidden by Doug Ford’s decision – wise, we can say at this point – to rely entirely on the opinion of the health control room in activating restrictions, measures and lockdowns. Since January, the impatience of frontline doctors, hospital associations, nurses and the most authoritative virologists have grown in line with the embarrassments of the executive, hasty decisions changed within a few hours or days, in the face of contradictory measures that disproved what had been approved just before. Exacerbating the situation, came the epidemiological curve data that for many weeks were out of control, the impressive numbers of intensive care admissions that led to the sine die cancellation of all non-essential surgical operations and the transport of hospital patients to Ontario hotspots in other areas of the province less affected by Covid.

The report presented yesterday by Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk crystallizes a sample of errors, negligence, superficiality and incompetence on the part of the provincial government that really leave foundations. It is evident that we have learned nothing from the Sars epidemic of 2003, just as we have not learned the lesson of the first and second waves of Covid-19.

So, faced with the obvious inadequacy of the current provincial executive, with the polls recording the collapse of the consensus towards the Conservative prime minister, that the government takes refuge in the old, obsolete, totally useless political show of the photo-opp, of the image to be consumed and digested easily, even if we were in the election campaign and not in the midst of the worst pandemic in recent years. And so we are moved by the arrival of 3 doctors and 6 nurses from Newfoundland and Labrador – remember that according to Ontario hospital associations the shortages of health workers are at 600 – and we applaud the efficiency of the provisional clinics opened quickly and furiously in hotspots, forgetting that these facilities have very limited doses: the one opened yesterday at the Albion Arena, in North York, administered just 2,500 of them, a drop in the ocean compared to current needs. And moving forward, we have a premier who gets the AstraZeneca vaccine injected to overcome the public reticence that has now classified the serum produced by the Anglo-Swedish consortium as a Serie B vaccine, but we put in the background the logistical and organizational inefficiencies that have led the stocks of vaccines available to exceed one million doses until last week. On the school – with the closure, the reopening, the new closure, the promise of a return to class then denied after a few hours – it is better to layout a pitiful veil. The consequences for students, who have essentially lost two academic years, will be devastating, especially in the long term.

 At this point, it remains to be understood what Ontario really needs. In this critical phase, the province needs a government that returns to listen to the health authorities, an executive that does not change its mind one day yes and the other as well, a premier who puts aside the cabaret policy of the announcements and returns to deal pragmatically with the health crisis and the economic crisis caused by Covid.