It is coming up on two years since Covid arrived in Canada on a large scale. And with the exception of the Atlantic provinces, we quickly adopted what has become the approach to Covid in most of the Global North: lots of hygiene theatre governed by the imperatives of neoliberalism.
In a way, Canada west of the Gaspé has been a leader in developing not just the policy but the discourse around Covid that has spread through the G7 nations and around Oceania and the European Union. The basic policy is this: if an activity accelerates the spread of Covid but its participants are making money for someone richer than themselves by participating, it should proceed. Only if hospitals and other crucially necessary systems are overwhelmed because of these activities shall they be temporarily halted or scaled-back. But if an activity does not make money for someone richer than the participants, it should probably be stopped or radically circumscribed.
These policies leave people feeling angry and emotionally wrung-out. They are supposed to work harder and work longer hours to compensate for all the lost labour and efficiency due to Covid. But they can’t see very many of their friends or relatives for support and community, unless they do so somewhere other people can make money. I have lost track of the number of times my provincial health officer has declared, without any evidentiary basis, that a gathering that would be unsafe around a kitchen or dining room table will be safe at a local restaurant or bar. Similarly, children, Bonnie Henry has repeatedly claimed, can only give each other Covid in each other’s homes; it cannot transmit in schools. Henry, there, is a bit of an outlier; only Donald Trump held out longer in making baseless unscientific claims of childhood immunity.
Of increasing importance in our governments’ performances of theatrical, half-assed vigilance has been the introduction of vaccine passports. The premise on which the passports were introduced seemed a reasonable one: vaccines would prevent or radically reduce Covid transmission, thereby making gatherings of pass holders. While the passports made the civil libertarian in me pretty squeamish, I decided that this temporary abridgement of human liberty might be a necessary price to pay for a Covid-free nation.
But, as we all know, this initial premise for the passports was false. The common variants of Covid in this country are variants whose mortality and morbidity are significantly reduced by the vaccines but on whose transmission rates vaccination has had a much smaller than anticipated effect and one that has continued to decline over time as the variant mix has changed. For a while, public health officials and government leaders tried to maintain their defense of the passports as a measure to halt or radically slow transmission but they have slowly given up selling us that substantial exaggeration and have changed their message.
The new idea is that the purpose of vaccine passports is that they are a means by which we can force unvaccinated people to get their shots. The idea, our governments and respected opinion leaders are now explaining, is that these passports can be used to compel people to be vaccinated against their will by threatening their access to their friends, their relatives, meeting spaces in their communities and, most importantly, by threatening their ability to be employed.
Before continuing, let me make clear that I think everyone without a medical condition making it ill-advised or potentially lethal, should choose to receive as many shots as they can sign up for. I just got my third on Monday and I don’t expect it will be my last one. I want this to happen because I don’t want to see my neighbours dead, hospitalized or suffering lifelong “long Covid” symptoms. All of those things are not just bad outcomes for unvaccinated individual but for society as a whole.
But I disagree with the government’s increasingly coercive vaccine mandates for two reasons:
First, I wish we lived in a society like Eisenhower’s America, in which all sectors of society trusted the government and the vaccine they got the pharmaceutical industry to produce. But we do not. Significant groups of people in our society have so little trust in their governments that they balk in terror at accepting any new state invasion of their personal space of decision-making. Rather than engaging in the process of re-earning that trust, government spokespeople are, instead, belittling, demonizing and marginalizing anyone who says they do not trust the state with their health. Those who oppose the passports and even those who simply question them are automatically tarred as “white nationalists,” Klansmen, Nazis, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers. They are increasingly depicted by progressive politicians like Justin Trudeau as enemies of the people, people “who hold unacceptable views.”
This kind of language, in turn, helps to whip up hysteria against vaccine opponents. Thanks to the Identitarian orthodoxy and the neo-McCarthyism (sometimes called ‘cancel culture’) that is used to enforce it, progressives are already not just permissive of but enthusiastic about using summary firing and professional blacklisting as ways of dealing with the enemies of the people. A long-time comrade of mine, who is immune-suppressed due to having leukemia and requiring regular chemotherapy and other body-punishing treatments, was advised by her doctor not to be vaccinated and possesses an exemption. Nevertheless, efforts were made to see her writing contracts were not renewed and she braved daily threats against her life on social media, some by former comrades and friends.
Second, and relatedly, I do not believe that the establishment wants the people it has now branded as the enemies of the people to become vaccinated. While it is clear that the introduction of the vaccine passports caused a lot of people to become vaccinated, it is my belief that the passports are now producing the opposite effect, and public health officials know that.
I say this because any reputable public health professional today knows about what is called “denormalization theory.” Smoking and other kinds of addiction have been extensively studied in BC because we, as legendary addictions theorist Bruce Alexander puts it, we have a “uniquely addictogenic culture.” A little over a decade ago, former COPE city councilor Fred Bass and polymath health scientist Amy Salmon made a significant contribution to the study of denormalization and the perverse effects it can produce.
Most anti-vice public awareness campaigns, such as those against tobacco smoking and drinking during pregnancy, are attempts to “denormalize” vice activities in the public’s mind. The message of the campaigns is that successful, normal, contributing members of society do not engage in these disreputable activities. Such activities are not respectable and engaging in them marks oneself as someone not deserving of respect. When examining the whole population, evidence shows these campaigns to be successful; smoking rates fall, drinking during pregnancy declines.
What Salmon and Bass discovered, however, is that one’s reaction to denormalization is directly contingent on the social position in which an individual is located and what their expectations are regarding their future social position. Social stigma only works as a threat, it turns out, if you are not already awash in stigma anyway. Consequently, they found that the smoking denormalization campaigns they studied functioned like cigarette ads for working class Indigenous adolescent girls and other groups that are not only marginalized but nurture little hope of changing their social position over time. When bombarded with an anti-smoking denormalization campaign based on the norms of English Canada, more poor Indigenous girls buy more cigarettes younger.
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Consequently, the most vaccine-hesitant have tended to be members of the working class and underclass with cultural memories destined to cast a pharmaceutical industry-government alliance in a less flattering light, like the ongoing opioid epidemic. These vaccine-hesitant folks, are often the lowest-wage workers, the most likely to practice an organized religion, those most likely to work with their hands and/or industrial tools owned by their employer or through a loan with a local bank.
You can already picture the vaccine-hesitant person in your mind’s eye. He’s rural; he drives a pickup truck; he voted Tory or People’s Party in the 2021 election; he lives in a manufactured home; he goes to church or at least his romantic partner does; he is white or Métis; he probably even smokes. That is the effect of a denormalization campaign interacting our pre-existing sectional and class resentments.
A sane public health policy would, once having achieved near complete vaccination of respectable folks, change its messaging and begin targeting groups that have become more vaccine-hesitant because of the denormalization campaign. They would work with evangelical and Catholic clergy and opinion leaders to promote vaccination; they would work with oil industry officials who are trusted by rig workers; they would try to persuade holdouts to get vaccinated by changing their message and approach.
Instead, the very opposite is happening. Rather than ending denormalization, they are heaping stigma upon stigma, smear upon smear. First, government spokespeople disingenuously conflate opposition to passports with vaccine non-compliance, erasing the thousands of Canadians like me who are triple-vaccinated but still oppose mandates. Once redescribing us as an unvaccinated drain on the public health system, they then reason that because white nationalists are also overrepresented in the manufactured homes and work camps of Northern Canada, it must then follow that opposing vaccine passports and white nationalism are two tenets of a single political community. In this gross and inappropriate abuse of the intellectual concept of the political dog whistle, it is argued that opposing vaccine passports is both a declaration that one is unvaccinated and a statement of support for the creation of a white nationalist Petro state in Western Canada.
A handful of people argue that this is simply the next logical step in a strategy to force full compliance. If people do not just lose their jobs and larger careers but are tarred in the public square as racists, Klansmen, neo-Confederates, even Nazis, surely more will capitulate and knuckle-under, and beg for that jab in the arm, begging for mercy from the stern consequences of the technocratic state. The thing is: the kind of people who respond to escalating intimidation and threats are the kind of people who are already vaccinated.
So I do not think that is the purpose of this in the minds of our nation’s establishment. They are, I believe, playing with a kind of purity politics that would make Narendra Modi blush. The idea is to declare a growing portion of people to be outside society, itself, like the Dalits of Indian history, the ultimate scapegoats whose very touch renders whatever it contacts impure, beyond the bounds of society itself.
The idea is to create a class of permanent exiles, like the Roma of Europe, people we can push out of our workplaces, our restaurants, our pubs, even our family gatherings, a living example of the fate of those who step outside the bounds set for our ever-narrowing discourse. Already we are blaming them for individual and public health outcomes they could not possibly have changed by being vaccinated. No doubt, with the over-representation of coal-rollers and rig workers among them, we will increasingly look to blame them and not companies like Royal Dutch Shell or agencies like our armed forces for climate change.
Our government’s vaccination policies and their responses to anti-passport protesters are clearly not designed to make holdouts less vaccine hesitant. It is almost as though they have been designed to provoke key elements of the working class into becoming more entrenched in their vaccine refusal, making them increasingly financially and socially precarious, more desperate and more willing to consider extreme political positions and movements.
And it is this that will win Justin Trudeau his sought-after second majority.
Now that the Canadian establishment, progressives and centrists are increasingly comfortable in conflating opposition to vaccine passports, vaccine non-compliance and white nationalism into single phenomenon, the Trudeau government can make the argument that our society is actually full of Nazis, that not just the People’s Party but the Conservatives are rife with them. And that these vaccine non-compliant folks are responsible for the Covid epidemic not being over.
This will not just lure the Conservative Party into wave after wave of purges of candidates and members as it continues its desperate quest to recapture the mainstream; it will stampede NDP and Green voters into casting Liberal votes to protect Canada from this massive outbreak of pestilent white nationalists.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We need governments that put down the hammer and stop the smears, governments that care more about getting their political opponents’ health protected than manipulating them into a dangerous and unnecessary political confrontation.
Because the end-game is clear: the denormalization of political dissent.
