Governments must get on the same page on fighting COVID-19

More than almost anything else, is public trust. Trust that we will (mostly) pull together to do the right thing. And trust in the public officials who are calling on us to make sacrifices.

In the first wave of the pandemic, Canadians mostly heard a clear and consistent message from the top. Public health officials were on the same page, and it helped mightily to rally support for collective action against the virus.

But now that we’re well into the second wave, the message is fragmented and confusing. Just as bad, the medical experts charged with guiding us through the crisis aren’t nearly so united. They are sounding different notes, with a discordant result.

Predictably, public trust is eroding — and at just the wrong time. The numbers speak for themselves: new cases of COVID-19 are at record levels in Ontario and Quebec and the experts warn we may be on the brink of exponential growth in the disease. The health care system, they say, once again risks being overwhelmed.

Yet governments are clearly not united on what to do about this. This past week, for example, on restaurants, banquet halls and gyms in so-called hotspots like Toronto and Peel Region, and urged people to limit their social contacts.

The new rules on socializing, though, are far from clear. At one point on Friday, Premier Doug Ford was asked a straightforward question: is it OK for someone to have Thanksgiving dinner with his mother?

The premier passed this on to his health minister, who passed it on to the chief coroner, who in turn passed it on to the province’s chief medical officer of health. Many words later the straightforward answer still didn’t have a straightforward answer. Dr. David Williams, the chief medical officer, only urged that people “hunker back down.”

Perhaps it’s too much to expect precise answers in a situation that is inherently ambiguous. But if the future course of the pandemic really does depend on our collective actions, it would be helpful to have more than broad advice on how to conduct ourselves.

More serious, though, is the open disagreement between the province and the City of Toronto as to next steps.

The city, through Dr. Eileen de Villa, its top public health official, It wants to ban indoor restaurant dining and sports activities for four weeks. And for the same period it wants people to leave their homes “only for essential purposes” — work, school, health care, buying food, and the like.

Whether such an appeal will work is a big question. People stayed home back in March and April for a simple reason: just about everything was closed and there was hardly any point in going out. Expecting them to stay home when offices, shops, restaurant patios, playgrounds and such are open is a very big ask.

But behind de Villa’s recommendation is the hope that by taking those steps now, the most draconian scenario of another general lockdown can be avoided. If only for that reason, it’s worth a try. Being responsible now and limiting your social contacts may be tough, but if it heads off a repeat of the dark days of March and April, it will be well worth it.

Still, even those measures may not be taken. The city insists it doesn’t have the legal power to do what it wants to do, and is calling on the province to either enforce those measures for Toronto and other hotspots, or give the city the power to do that itself. On the other side, the province says the city already has all the legal authority it needs.

We’ve seen this kind of legal buck-passing — you go first, no you go first — between the two levels of government before, and it’s tiresome. In fact, at this point it’s more than tiresome; it’s dangerous.

COVID-19 doesn’t care about these squabbles. It’s on the march, and governments need to get on the same page on how to battle its second wave. Their failure to do that is putting that vital public trust at risk.