Ford is Bankrupting Small Business to Please the Media

With cases of Covid 19 reaching over 1000 per day in Ontario, Doug Ford has decided to lockdown all “non-essential” business in the Toronto and Peel region for 28 days starting Monday. This means at minimum the lockdown will go until December 21, putting Christmas in serious jeopardy.

These lockdowns are being pushed as a mechanism to curb the spread of covid. However, as of right now we do not have any real data linking the business shutdown and the spread of the disease. 

The other problem is that the schools are still open, which is very likely to be one of the primary vectors for spreading covid as it gives a way for the virus to jump between households. So there is a good chance that these new measures will have a minimal impact on mitigating the spread of the disease, while having a major destructive impact on small businesses.

Ford allowing restaurants and bars to continue to serve food with only curb-side pickup available may seem like a remedy to the dine-in ban, but it is likely to fall very far short of the type of income these businesses need to stay open.

Ford said at the announcement of these lockdown measures that, “The situation is extremely serious and further action is required to avoid the worst case scenario,” which does not seem to be aware of the harm lockdowns have had on people’s health (especially when it comes to increases in substance abuse), as well as the financial well-being of entire industries deemed “non-essential” to the public, but which are very essential to the people who own and operate them.

Despite Ford saying that these measures are meant to protect the most vulnerable it was the Ontario government who did not protect nursing and long-term care homes at the start of the pandemic and have similarly failed to protect them when lockdowns ended as if they were no longer vulnerable. 

There is a major disconnect in Ford’s lockdown. For some reason restaurants are particularly dangerous but schools can stay open, and people can shop in grocery and liquor stores freely. 

On top of that, if the situation in the Peel region and Toronto is so bad why is the Ontario government waiting until November 23 to actually implement the lockdown?

What it seems like is going on is Ford and the Ontario government believe they can appear as if they are taking the pandemic super seriously to the media by taking actions against the operations of restaurants and “non-essential” businesses, which effects a minority of Ontarians in Toronto and Peel, but won’t put hard restrictions on the rest of the population who at worst just needs to cook at home a bit more than usual. 

We find ourselves in a sort of television show Ford has put on for Ontario’s biggest lockdown activists, the worst being the media. He is willing to sacrifice many small business owners’ and workers’ livelihood in order to symbolically appear to be taking the situation seriously, for the applause of the media, while small businesses go bankrupt.

This isn’t just an assumption, just today a Canadian business group warned that with further lockdowns 1 in 7 business may not actually survive with the current restrictions, or full closers for some businesses like gyms and movie theatres, being put into place.

Ford needs to wake up and realize that being the premier in Ontario is not a part in a TV show or Netflix series and his lack of consideration for the productive class of Ontario has real consequences.