Passports

To no one's surprise, after ruling them out (saying he didn't want a split society), the prospects of a fairly dire fall have forced Doug Ford's hand, and Ontario will be getting some sort of vaccine passports after all.  Now no question there are going to be issues with the implementation (and I just read a story that the way they will be implemented completely screws the people who volunteer to test vaccines, so they will start dropping out of the studies), but on the whole this seems completely necessary.  However, it is also going to really motivate the extremists.  Mercifully they are a much smaller (and largely less dangerous) crowd than in the States, but still large enough to cause huge headaches.  The main benefit of the passport is that by applying the rules so broadly to non-essential services, these jerks will stop targeting individual restaurants.  Quite honestly, I have no sympathy with these losers, but the bigger fear is there seems to be no way to re-introduce them into society.  They have absolutely no trust in any government, and at least some of them have really embraced a truly nihilistic worldview.  It's the same question of what to do with the Trumpers that have taken over the Republican Party.  I certainly don't have any workable solutions, and there are far too many of them to simply ignore them...

Back to Ontario (with its more manageable problems), the passports will be required from Sept. 22 to enter gyms, movie theatres, concerts and plays.  It's possible that a few places will start requiring them sooner.  For the first few weeks, I guess we'll just wave around printouts of our vaccination status, but at some point, there will be an official app.  I'll certainly be curious if a few of the gym regulars drop out, and things may be fairly tense for the first week or two, but on the whole Canadians are simply more accommodating rule-followers, so I think the storm will pass.  Apparently, just the threat of the passport coming in has caused some of the people sitting on the fence to sign up for the vaccines, and that is exactly how it is supposed to work.  Getting vaccinated is still largely a personal choice, but there will be more severe consequences if you decide against it, and indeed for people working in health care or teaching, refusing the vaccine will probably lead to losing one's job.  Given that school children will ultimately almost certainly be required to add this to their vaccine list, I wish they would just bite the bullet and do this now, rather than over the winter.  The signals from the Province were so mixed, that universities didn't require students to be vaccinated until just recently when it is too late to salvage in-person learning for the fall.  Certainly frustrating, though I guess it could be worse.  B.C. is being weirdly libertarian around masks and vaccines for universities, and I think they will come to regret this.  (I'm not even going to touch the dumpster fire that is Calgary.  They are beyond hope...)

I've generally had a pretty high risk tolerance, since I was double vaccinated, and with the passports, I won't hesitate too much to return to in-person arts activities.  In the next post, I'll probably list a few concerts and plays that I think I'll get to.  Unless of course the next variant changes plans yet again...