The Rover and a government that bends reality

While Quebec leads all provinces in COVID-19 deaths, the premier saw fit to congratulate himself this week

In my mind, it was a career-making play. I sped between two defenders to catch a bounce pass and bury a lay-up just as the buzzer sounded. Game over.

I leapt and swung my first towards the rafters just as Michael Jordan would have done. There may have been some chest pounding and an embarrassingly nasal scream of “That’s how you do!”

We lost 125 to 26.

That would explain why no one carried me across the gymnasium chanting “Tito! Tito! Tito!” Well, that and the janitor had to put the nets up for a girl’s volleyball tournament the following morning.

When you’re 13 and your body is a hormone machine, perspective and humility are hard to come by. Acne and awkwardly timed erections? Yes. Wisdom? Not so much.

I was reminded of this particularly cringe-inducing memory this week after Quebec Premier François Legault appeared to engage in his own poorly timed celebration.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Legault gave himself a nice pat on the back.

“When we look at what happened at Christmas, well I congratulate myself for having taken stricter measures than public health recommended,” said Legault. “It could have been a lot worse in our hospitals had we allowed more places to stay open.”

Legault’s implication is that he saved lives by cracking the whip against public gatherings during the holidays. To be fair, there’s little doubt we would have lost more people to COVID-19 had he allowed families to get together over the holidays.

But he’ll have to forgive us for not hoisting him away on our shoulders. You see, our arms are tired from burying the dead.

There are, at last count, 10,361 COVID-19 deaths in Quebec — that’s roughly half the country’s total and the worst of any province or territory. You wouldn’t know it from listening to the premier speak or looking at his public approval ratings.

Legault’s 64 per cent approval rating was tied for the highest of any Canadian premier in a recent Angus Reid poll. 

So you can see why he might be under the illusion that he’s earned the right to congratulate himself. Well done, sir! You’ll get your plaque in the mail and lifetime subscription to Lowered Expectations Magazine (a property of ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME Media Incorporated).

Sometimes, you just have to throw your hands up and accept that politics don’t make that much sense.

To be fair, Quebec probably would have been a COVID death trap regardless of who was at the helm. Long-term care centres are at the epicentre of our botched COVID-19 response, and that particular failure reaches across party lines. It took generations of PQ and Liberal indifference to doom our elders.

Before the pandemic hit our shores last winter, all it took was a heatwave to kill off our grandparents by the dozens. 

Under Philippe Couillard’s Liberals in 2018, 89 residents of long-term care facilities died in pools of their own sweat during the first week of July. Meanwhile in Ontario, not a single elder died from the heat during that same period. The sun’s radiation doesn’t work differently on the west side of the Ottawa River. Their public policy, however, does.

But the dogshit legacy Legault inherited is irrelevant at this point. He has a majority government and they’re accountable for how our institutions work.

Except that they’re not.

It’s almost as though they get to choose their own reality. I’m reminded now of an unfolding scandal in Quebec’s primary schools. Several times a day, teachers are asked to take measurements of their classrooms’ air quality and report it back to their superiors.

It’s a way to gauge whether our schools are an incubator for the virus, to keep our families and our communities safe. But there’s a problem with the methodology. Three sources who work in primary schools told me the data isn’t reliable. Teachers are told their school will face consequences if they show their bosses bad air quality reports.

So they juke the stats: they take measurements when the classrooms are empty, they hold the instrument next to an open window, they find a way to make the numbers lie.

When reality doesn’t please the government, the government simply bends reality to better suit its narrative.

It helps that the Coalition Avenir Québec has combined this strategy with its other favourite trick: sleight of hand.

And we’re all a bit vulnerable to children’s birthday party magic right now because it’s depressing to think about the elderly suffocating to death and we’re bored of aimlessly scrolling through Netflix. So while they rot in their deathbeds, we’re presented with a new crisis: the debate over academic freedom. 

Legault would have you believe our universities are under siege from hordes of radical youth, shaking their fists at authority, demanding all whites be erased from our history books and listening to their rock and roll music at maximum volume.

While it’s true that some students are pushing back at university professors who use the n-word in an academic setting, there’s no data to back up this imaginary crisis. All we have are a handful of anecdotes about teachers not knowing how to address controversial topics in a rapidly evolving world. That’s university.

It would be funny if it weren’t so effective.

Like moths to a flame, the province’s white columnists are all lining up to chastise the bogeymen — who, conveniently, are Black, Indigenous, transgender and have no power outside of their social media accounts.

Here’s some data for you: in the two weeks since François Legault promised his government would crack down on these campus communists, 188 people have died of COVID-19.

We can bend the narrative, we can juke the stats and we can bury the dead under mountains of bullshit. But eventually there will be a reckoning.

In case you're curious, my high school basketball team won zero games that year. Didn’t stop me from celebrating like an asshole every time I scored a basket. Which was … not often.

We’re only human, after all.

Your friend,

Chris

***

EXCITING NEWS! 

Okay, so this took way too long but in the coming days, I’ll be doing a Zoom call with four people on this mailing list. We’ll do this with four randomly selected people every week until we’ve all had a chance to meet and talk.

The idea is that you’re paying to have your say in how I do this work and, so far, The Rover hasn’t quite delivered on that level of interactivity. I want this to be your project too. 

So some of you will get an email later today and we’ll set up a time where we can talk about anything you’d like. If you don’t have the time on a given week, we’ll postpone your call until you do and choose someone else in the meantime. 

If you do get an email, you’ll have 24 hours to respond before we give your spot to someone else. No worries if you miss out, we’ll ask again. So watch those inboxes, rovers!

I’m excited to hear from you.

***

Read some journalism! 

My piece on the other side of cancel culture, where I spoke to students who have experienced racism on their campus about their experiences, has been translated by Ricochet’s French edition. So you can now share it with older relatives you want to pick fights with in French. 

This week I reported on a migrant detention facility, better known as a jail, in Laval. Undocumented migrants being held there told horrifying stories of being denied medical care and held in what amounts to solitary confinement. 

These are serious human rights abuses, and if they happened in some far away land our government would condemn them. But they’re happening right here, in a federally run detention centre. One of these inmates is on a hunger strike, and hasn’t eaten for a week and a half. He says he won’t eat again until all the detainees are freed. 

It’s easy to forget about people locked away in institutions, but they are some of the most vulnerable during this pandemic. These are just a few of their voices.