Toronto City Life » #insertmaskpun

#insertmaskpun

Posted on July 13th, 2020 –

So it’s been about a week since our betters passed a municipal bylaw requiring the imposition of mandatory indoor masks pretty much everywhere except schools and daycare, transportation (noting that the TTC has its own bylaws), medical facilities, and residential buildings.

There are some neat specifics for businesses, like bars, which can legally allow patrons indoors:

*The bylaw allows for temporary removal of a mask or face covering when receiving services (such as having a meal) or while actively engaging in an athletic or fitness activity.

How thoughtful! You’re allowed to temporarily lift your mask to shove a fry in your mouth or down a few gulps of lager.

The implied stupidity makes it really hard to take it seriously. And I suspect this is why many people doubt government so-called experts and advisors. After all, this is the same caliber of people who brought us things like the smoking bylaw that penalizes business owners if they fail to police a 9 meter (29.5 feet) radius in front of their premises, a distance that often extends well into the street if not all the way across.

I haven’t heard of anyone being rounded up into cattle cars yet so for me the mask bylaw has so far been only a mild irritant. And there are loopholes in it that are big enough to drive a truck through. Nevertheless, I sympathize with the people who see this as a slippery slope.

Developments like the increasingly indefinite emergency measures being introduced by Doug Ford’s lackeys, when compared with something like the 9/11 anti-terror laws that over the years have never really abated, tend to produce some very plausible conclusions even if those conclusions haven’t yet been borne out.

When Doug Ford claims it’s not a power grab are we to assume he’s being honest? The oxymoron doth run deep there.

So is it so surprising when we find people resisting increasingly dictatorial demands by the state even as that same state tells us that Covid infections are way down “but we have to be ready for the next wave”? Sounds an awful lot like arbitrary, indefinite lockdowns and a complete stripping of people’s rights in the name of “public health measures“.

On top of that, it seems that in their frenzied efforts to impose their controls, governments may actually be openly violating the laws of their masters, something I realized while observing an interaction at a bank between a woman refusing to wear a mask and a front-door security officer refusing her access (to her own money).

The woman was showing the rent-a-cop the bylaw and claiming she had an illness, therefore couldn’t wear a mask. The diminutive female guard asked the woman what kind of illness she had and even after she was told it was asthma there was a lot of hemming and hawing.

At first I thought, how shitty of the government to make the businesses and ultimately their employees responsible for facing people’s wrath in increasingly tense times. Besides, I doubt most of these Covid bouncers have any training in determining which illnesses may or may not qualify so putting the onus on them to make safety decisions seems quite reckless.

Moreover, aren’t there provincial health privacy laws that specifically prevent random people demanding answers to exactly these types of questions? Aren’t business owners opening themselves up to lawsuits if they follow the city bylaw? Or do municipal laws supersede provincial legislation now?

Maybe until they get their act together we should #defundthestate