Statistically speaking, British Columbians have been a lucky lucky bunch so far in the Coronavirus global pandemic. Compared to our immediate neighbours, Alberta and Washington, we have enjoyed low rates of infection, low death rates and have not run out of hospital beds for Covid-19 patients once.
Given the relatively lax rules concerning the industrial, building trades and agricultural sectors compared to California, Ontario, Québec and New York, where things are going far worse, we have to acknowledge that at least some of this is a result of sheer luck. But luck can, by no means, account for all of the difference.
One reason we have been touched comparatively lightly so far is culture. Like so many people my age, when I think about the place I am from, I imagine it as it was when I first became an adult and developed impressions of it. For me, BC will, in a way, always be located in 1994. It will always be a rough and tumble place whose politics is dominated by its industrial hinterland, a culture where the populist demagogues of the right squared off with the populist demagogues of the left to capture the imagination of Williams Lake, Merritt and Port Alberni.
But it is not that place anymore. One of the reasons I feel so much more comfortable in Prince George than in my home town of Vancouver is that it is hard to find BC’s old populist, mill town culture, even when there is still a nearby mill. The huge urban majority of the southwest that dominates our politics and culture has changed a lot; its politics don’t follow the lead of Campbell River; they follow the lead of the Napa Valley. Our people are, for the most part, no longer a populist lot but are, instead part of the coastal progressive urban culture of Anglo America’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts.
Meanwhile, Ontario, which used to be the centre of Anglo progressivism in Canada is now full of angry, confused, politically volatile populists represented by characters like Doug Ford. Toronto may be Chicago-north but it is surrounded an Ontario that is far more Michigan than Illinois.
This was brought home to me when I was chatting with a guy in my building about a month after Covid hit and I asked him why he thought we were comparatively unscathed, compared to his relatives’ home, Toronto. He responded that it was because BC’s Chief Medical Health Officer, Bonnie Henry, had ordered major lockdowns all over the province, banned travel, banned evictions and shut down the entire manufacturing and building trades sectors. Ontario, on the other hand, hadn’t done those things. So they were reaping what they had sewn.
Except, of course, that the opposite was true.
Ontario had ordered an industrial shutdown and BC had refused to. Ontario had shut down most construction and BC had refused to. BC had even gone so far as to strip local governments of the right to enact more stringent emergency measures and forced travelers into jurisdictions unwilling to accept them.
But, I realized, there was a way in which what my neighbour was saying actually was true. People in BC had acted as though nearly every piece of non-binding advice Henry had given them was a law being enforced at gun point. Meanwhile, Ontario’s industrial leaders and their workers just assumed Ford was blustering and grandstanding; he couldn’t really have meant for them to shut down.
BC has become such a progressive place, such a Approaching online drug store is more convenient viagra cheapest pharmacy rather than OTC medicines. The process starts with the sexual arousal, and the brain discount levitra online provides signals to the penile nerve actively. Once the sexual intercourse is over, these veins open up again and blood flows in a normal manner and the person is able to sustain erection properly and get rid of all kinds of difficulties regarding email and stuff. discount tadalafil Many people using this medicine do not have serious side cialis brand online effects. worshipper of technocratic authority that, in addition to making icons, shoes and beverages in tribute to Henry, they treat her word as something better than law, as gospel. Essentially, BC has, culturally, become a place that epitomizes the great neoliberal law enforcement principle, “voluntary compliance.”
This key aspect of BC culture is about to serve our government even better as we enter the next stage of Covid response, i.e. where we call low-wage workers back to work in dangerous and unnecessary jobs like restaurant wait staff to “reopen the economy.” To be clear, folks, “the economy” has never been closed. We just reduced the number of activities in the economy likely to cause pointless deaths. But, because some businesses might go under and our economy might shrink, we have decided to end special pandemic income assistance programs and tell bars, pubs and restaurants to reopen so that, even if people want to stay away from their old table waiting or night club bouncer or exotic dancer job, the government will force them to return to work by ending the eviction moratorium and CERB, giving them a choice to return to a high-risk job or be thrown onto the street.
Consequently, we know the number of Covid cases will continue to rise as the government makes more decisions to forcibly march people back to work at high-risk jobs.
As we watch these cases increase, a logical response might be to issue a new order to close restaurant and club table service; we might also close public space conducive to large, tightly-packed crowds gathering or, heaven forbid, enact laws at the provincial, federal or municipal level to permit ticketing and fining of events that violate our non-binding crowd guidelines.
In response to the rise in cases the past week following the “reopening,” the government could be making and enforcing laws that keep us safe and housed. Instead, there has been a pivot.
Remember when everything was on fire on a scale never seen before, when wildfires destroyed homes, towns and wreathed the West in smoke for months? There was the evacuation of Fort MacMurray as it almost seemed like God was forcing the tar sands industrial complex to reap what it had sown.
Canada’s capitalist governments and media began focusing on how young people were being careless by smoking when camping or violating campfire bans. A picture began to be painted, showing the true culprits: people in their early twenties, having too good a time, being self-centred and not caring about their elders, disrespecting authority and causing death and ruin with their youthful inattention and carelessness.
It is these images that our government sought to replace other images in our minds, of Stephen Harper, of Royal Dutch Shell, of Suncor, of Enbridge, the image of a field of oil wells, giving way to an image of scantily-clad young people smoking a joint in the woods, having too good a time at all our expense.
This is a kind of moral panic, a cultural phenomenon whereby a society becomes very concerned about something suddenly and seeks to exculpate itself from blame and instead blame contemporary youth culture for whatever the problem. Blame for increased property crime is shifted away from addiction, mental health and collapse of the welfare state and onto “youth gangs,” ideally racialized ones. Blame for a planet burning to death is shifted from Big Oil and onto young hosers smoking a joint and looking at the stars.
Make no mistake: BC’s establishment has decided to cover the fact that they are willing to kill people to make more money in the hospitality sector by creating a moral panic. Look at al those photos out there suddenly of all those attractive young people in bathing suits. (Don’t you wish you looked that good still? Don’t you wish those young people would sleep with you instead of each other? Isn’t a disgrace that they don’t even know who you are, much less respect you?) Look at their smug, indifferent expressions, smiling and drinking!
The government’s reaction to these kids is, of course, not to enact or enforce laws to stop them doing this sort of thing, as with other matters of life and death, seat belts or non-smoking areas. No. It is to beg them, plead with them, scold them, via a program they do not watch or listen to, to please please stop. Because, as I stated early in the pandemic, the scolding is the point.
Every day, we could issue an order or make a law. But we don’t.
In fact, these young people need to keep making these displays and then being scolded because that is the cover the local bar owner needs in order to recall his youthful serving staff, who are working madly to avoid eviction, and not at the beach at all. Those youthful serving staff can then serve the older, richer people who, by the end of the night, will often be too disinhibited to physically distance, even if they wished to. And when deaths begin to further escalate, nobody will be looking at the bar; everyone will be looking at kids at the beach.
And the best thing about our made-in-BC moral panic is that our province’s newly progressive culture of voluntary compliance will feel guiltless about blaming young hosers and their party on Okanagan Lake for the deaths of those forced back to work in a vortex of contagion, by heartless government policy decisions. In fact, we will happily conflate and confuse these two groups because of their youth and think that all those servers probably had it coming. After all, they were not voluntarily compliant; and that’s un-British Columbian.
Blaming youth culture for the results of systemic oppression and inequality: that’s BC!
