Ontario’s hard-right Progressive Conservative government has released a plan to reopen the province’s schools that explicitly advocates a murderous policy of mass infection for students, educators, and their relatives. The plan is meant to serve as the basis for a full return early next month to in-class instruction for […]
Ontario government calls for “normalizing” COVID-19 as it releases school reopening plan
Ontario’s hard-right Progressive Conservative government has released a plan to reopen the province’s schools that explicitly advocates a murderous policy of mass infection for students, educators, and their relatives.
The plan is meant to serve as the basis for a full return early next month to in-class instruction for the first time since mid-April. Last spring, the government was forced to order all Ontario to move to online learning, amid a catastrophic third wave of the pandemic that was overwhelming hospitals and had already led local medical offices of health in Toronto, Peel and other regions to enforce school closures.
Released last Tuesday, the government plan provides no details about how COVID-19 outbreaks will be managed or benchmarks for school closures.
Underscoring that these glaring omissions from the 26-page plan were intentional, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. Kieran Moore, responding to a question about how school closures would be decided, asserted, “I really don’t see our schools closing going into the fall and winter and spring. I really can’t envision or see any closures of any schools in Ontario, or colleges or universities.”
Moore continued, “We have to normalize COVID-19 for our schools.” Claiming that COVID-19, which has already killed more than 26,600 Canadians, is akin to the seasonal flu, Ontario’s chief medical officer stated that at any given time, 10 to 15 percent of students could be expected to be infected. “But they recover, they resolve and they’re back in the classroom,” Moore declared.
In light of what is known about the threat posed by the virus and its variants to children, these statements, together with the government’s back-to-school plan, are nothing short of criminal. During the first six months of this year, around 1,500 children died due to COVID-19 in Brazil, where the virus has become one of the leading causes of death among young people. In Indonesia, where the Delta variant is running rampant, more than 100 children died every week during the month of July.
Epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding, a leading expert on COVID-19, recently warned, “Let this sink in—1 percent of all COVID-19 confirmed cases in kids lead to hospitalization. Is that really an acceptable level of kids’ morbidity that we will allow in society?” To translate this into the situation in Ontario, this means that if 20 percent of the province’s approximately 1 million elementary school students were to get infected (a conservative estimate given that not a single one of them will be vaccinated come September), 2,000 would end up in hospital.
The Ontario government is not only prepared to “allow” such levels of infection and death but is taking positive steps to facilitate it. The back-to-school plan contains no guidelines for testing asymptomatic students and no vaccine mandates for students or staff. Although cohorting of students in smaller groups formally remains in place, there are so many exceptions to the rule that it is made effectively meaningless. For example, school buses are allowed to operate without restrictions, students can mix in common areas like libraries and canteens, cohorting will not be applied during after-school clubs and sports, and high-contact indoor sports, like hockey and basketball, are permitted. Even music classes will be allowed to resume, with Moore positively encouraging students to sing and play woodwind instruments, two sure-fire ways to spread an airborne virus like COVID-19.
Yet the ruling elite across Canada is moving to abandon any effort to contain the virus. Less than a week prior to the Ford government’s back-to-school plan being made public, Alberta’s right-wing populist United Conservative Party government announced that all virus-related restrictions will be abolished as of August 16. Even people infected with COVID-19 will no longer be required to isolate.
These reckless policies, which threaten the lives of thousands of children and adults alike, have been facilitated by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his federal Liberal government. Throughout the pandemic, it has pursued a “profits before lives” strategy aimed at protecting the wealth of big business and the super-rich at the expense of the health, wellbeing, and very lives of workers and their families. This has included leading the back-to-work/back-to-school campaign.
