Principled Stance

It’s been a tumultuous week for Ontario NDP, after leader Andrea Horwath publicly opposed mandatory vaccination for frontline workers due to perceived infringement of Charter rights. She then “clarified” her position by changing it entirely, having received a ton of backlash.

There’s an election next year, so it’s important for people to know where their leaders stand. It takes a big person to admit wrongdoing and change course. Mind you, this wasn’t a miscommunication— it was a significant shift in policy stance, fifteen months into the pandemic.

While recognizing the Charter doesn’t protect economic interests per se, the issue is thorny. Vaccines have been highly politicized, so community division is inevitable no matter what happens next— which is exactly why policy should prioritize preventing more pandemic deaths.

Media discussions about consequences &/or restrictions flowing from vaccine status are barely scraping the surface. This thread by Nora Loreto should be mandatory reading for anyone who has an opinion on “vaccine passports”:

Here is a little thread on vaccine passports and how, again, media is getting this story wrong.

Journalists should not be asking "passports yes/no" but instead what it means for a government to institute a passport system (and what it means for a gov't to *not* institute one)

— Nora Loreto (@NoLore) August 4, 2021

Also, never lose sight of public enemy number one.