It’s impossible to choose the foulest aspect of Quebec Premier Francois Legault’s appalling, cynical vow that he will use the provincial tax system as punishment for those unvaccinated against COVID-19.
Everything about it is bad. But is the nastiest part the crude injustice? Or is it the doomed-to-failure incoherence that really scrapes the bottom of the barrel? Take your pick.
Bereft of even the scantest details about how his assault on both public health care and individual dignity will even work, Legault used the announcement as a brazen political deflection ploy to distract from the resignation of his top public health official, Dr. Horacio Arruda.
Leaving the focus on Dr. Arruda, after all, would inevitably lead to questions about why on earth he was left in place to lead the anti-COVID campaign for two years when it was agonizingly obvious a few months into the pandemic that he was mortifyingly unsuited to the task. In turn, of course, that would prompt even the premier’s enablers in the Quebec media to begin asking about his leadership incompetence that has led us full circle to even worse conditions than we faced when the long nightmare began in spring 2020.
Such a turnabout, for a politician who has basked in the ego glow of his status as Papa Quebec, could simply not be allowed to occur. To prevent it, he stooped to scapegoating what even he admits is a “tiny minority”—his words—of Quebecers who, for reasons of their own, have refrained from getting even a first vaccine jab. These numerically insignificant decliners, the premier vowed, will “get the bill” through imposition of an anti-vax tax to compensate for the “burden” they’ve placed on a hospital system that is, we’re told, days away from meltdown.
Ah, comes Premier Legault’s riposte, but the problem is not government bungling that would have made Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria scratch his ear. The problem is that the “tiny minority” of 10 percent unvaccinated are occupying 50 percent of COVID hospital beds while the approximately 90 percent who are vaccinated are occupying… the other 50 percent! Think about that. If half the beds go to the unvaccinated, and half go to the vaccinated, isn’t the problem that 100 percent of beds are too few beds? (See preparation instead of playing chicken above.) But wait. It gets worse. With this gang, it can’t get any other way, it seems.
It’s here that injustice rivals incoherence in the Legault-contrived debacle. It’s bad enough that the scheme the premier sketched is almost certainly illegal in that it contravenes the Canada Health Act’s requirement for equal access to health care, including hospitalization, without the impediment of user fees. Even worse is that it proposes to punish people for quite literally having done nothing.
The tax, at least in its current mumble mouth version, will be applied to anyone who hasn’t been vaccinated (and isn’t otherwise exempt). It will, then, apply even to those who are unvaccinated and COVID free, i.e., who have never stepped foot in a hospital or required resources from the health-care system to fight the virus.
They will not be punished for failing to do their part against the pandemic. They will be punished, courtesy of the State’s monopoly on the use of force, merely for failing to bow to the will of a political leadership cadre that has failed outrageously in its own duty of care to its citizens.
In decades as a journalist covering Canadian politics from tiny municipal councils to three tours of duty in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, I can’t recall ever witnessing anything worse.