Only
a week after
a frost warning at the family cottage in
Waupoos, Ontario, I was in the first
heat warning of 2021 on the first weekend in
June in our condo near Yorkdale
Mall, Toronto. I had walked my daily minimum 2
km around the block when it occurred
to me that I have spent over a year living
through a one-in-a century pandemic –
Covid-19 - most of it isolated with my wife
Pat. Case numbers are now falling. Pat
does a daily check of the numbers from the
Johns Hopkins website as part of her
pandemic routine. What has happened to the
issues I care about? On
this
pandemic itself, there is now media talk of an
end of the present pandemic lifestyle
in Canada by autumn 2021 with editorial hopes
in the Globe on June 5th that for 90% of the
population will be fully vaccinated by then.
Our appointments
for our second shot of the vaccine are in 10
days’ time. That made me feel
curiously up-beat. Then the 5th June weekend
Globe had a collection
of articles that reinforced some of my own
pandemic thinking. Monday 6 June’s
Globe had more thoughts in line with my own.
It seemed a good time for an essay
to say something about this pandemic from the
perspective of a couple of “second
decade” retirees. There
have
been learnings, changes and things we have
just plain missed in over a year of
pandemic life. I
read and I continued writing
monthly articles through these extraordinary
times. However, my mood and this
weekend’s Globe reinforced some of my own
themes in the reading and writing. The
Presidency
of Donald Trump in the US, the 2020
presidential election and thoughts about
democracy featured large in books and in my
own writing during 2020 and into
early 2021. Pat is a US citizen as well as a
Canadian and she became very
involved in the election. I became very
dismayed by what I read about “Dark
Money” and the impact of a libertarian
super-rich elite on the Republican Party
and the US democracy – in addition to the
Trump presidency itself. The Globe of
June 5th had an opinion peace on supporting
democracies, noting the sad
situation of democracy in the US and
suggesting Canada was in better shape to
lead an international initiative in support of
democracies. The co-author,
Jennifer Walsh, gave the 2016 Massey lectures
that reflected on democracies
entitled The Return of History. I
wrote about that in 2017. In 2019 I reported
on a book about improving Canadian democracy.
There
have
been positive changes to the scene of climate
change and global warming and the
Canadian response while our eyes were down, as
we sent our streams of personal email
letters to parliamentarians about not keeping
gas-fired electricity in Ontario or
not putting nuclear reactors near urban
centres. Significantly,
the
Supreme Court found on 25 March 2020 that the
Federal government has the Constitutional
authority to establish a national carbon tax –
significantly undermining the Conservative
governments of Ontario and Alberta who opposed
any form of “gas tax”. More significantly,
the Federal Conservative Party leadership then
made what is, except for
technicalities, the same thing as a national
gas tax policy for the Conservatives
– albeit a slightly less effective level of
“tax”. I read in May 2019 that William
Nordhaus, a Nobel winning economist on global
warming, showed in his book The
Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and
Economics for a Warming World, Yale
University Press, 2013, that
a tax on carbon fuels was the best
policy for tackling greenhouse gas emissions. When
I checked
in 2018 on the numbers from a 2014 report,
greenhouse gas production by the
transportation
sector was the biggest fraction of Ontario’s
production – 30%. So I was happy
to note that in September 2020 Ontario got a Ford Motor
Co. agreement to bring battery
electric vehicle production to Oakville and a
new engine derivative to Windsor.
A Fiat/Chrysler agreement included more than
$1.5 billion to build plug-in
hybrid vehicles and battery electric vehicles.
Then in January 2021 GM Canada promised
to invest $1 billion to transform its CAMI
plant in Ingersoll to make
commercial electric vehicles. And over in Quebec, Lion Electric Co., an
electric school bus manufacturer,
announced that it was about to step into
electric truck manufacture.
Although electric car numbers are
still small, there are now noticeable signs of
electric cars being driven
around and parked around Toronto. The
June 7
Globe had two more thoughtful opinion pieces
about a transition to lower carbon
fuel use. Greenhouse gas production by
commercial and residential buildings is number
3 on the list in the order of sectors
producing the most greenhouse gases in
Ontario. John Lorie’s opinion piece called for
real incentives to spur a switch
from natural gas to heat pumps and geothermal
for heating buildings. And it is
true that new buildings keep going up with gas
for heat and little encouragement
or even talk of alternatives. Then
Adam
Radwanski on the opening page of the Business
Section of June 7th Globe,
opined in support of the Just Transition Act –
an Act promised at one point by
the present Liberal government to facilitate
the transition in jobs for present
oil and gas workers. Two reports on the scale
of that transition are newly out.
It is positive that these things are now being
discussed. It is no longer a
question of whether to transition from oil and
gas. Now it’s about how many will
be affected and how to manage this change in
the economy fairly for the workers
affected. Finally, on June 10th the Globe’s
front-page headline was Keystone
XL project scrapped in blow to Canada’s
energy plan. Sometimes change doesn’t
give us the pleasure of believing that we made
it happen. Then we can just be thankful. Justice
for
Aboriginal Peoples suddenly became very
relevant again at the end of May 2021
following
the detection of buried children near a BC
residential school. The situation was
covered in a thoughtful Globe opinion piece by
Andrew Coyne on June 5. He reminded
us that taking down a statue or two of John A
MacDonald and Egerton Ryerson
does nothing about over 150 years of
bureaucrats and Prime Ministers who allowed
Residential Schools to continue until 1996.
Coyne says we are all implicated.
This is not matter of a few statues. Moreover,
the 215 children’s bodies
detected near a residential school in BC are
the tip of an iceberg according to
the reported testimony from former school
residents. Jody
Wilson-Raybould,
the former Liberal Justice Minister reminded
us in her opinion piece in the
June 5 Globe that more lofty governmental
rhetoric and mournful platitudes about
Aboriginal Peoples are not enough. The
situation calls for leadership and action.
The Indian Act is a colonial document that
maintains the status-quo throughout
and despite rhetoric and promises. Even
legislation for future rights for
Aboriginal Peoples in accordance with the
international declaration does not
provide clean water now. Justice is always
said to be coming - sometime, but
Wilson-Raybould
calls for action now. This is the Minister who
resigned because her job as Attorney
General required her to make her own decision
even if that went against governmental
pressure. Her integrity impressed upon me that
our votes must go to such people.
Vote for them for their integrity and for
their fruits but not for their vague
promises of better things to come. Beyond
the
developments on issues of concern, the
pandemic year has given insights into
governments. Before anyone knew any pandemic
was coming, a minority Liberal government
was elected in Ottawa in October 2019. This
Federal government has bluffed its
way through early shortages of Covid medical
equipment and vaccines, with many poorly
managed hand-outs to individuals and
businesses. There have been scandals around
a poorly chosen Governor General, conflicts
around proposed contracts with the
WE organization, and the resignation of a
Finance minister. Nonetheless, this
government has remained fairly high in the
polls. So there have been rumblings
of a fall election this year. Hence there has
been a proliferation of the lofty
rhetoric and the many platitudes that
Wilson-Raybould writes scathingly about. Meanwhile,
the
populist Ford Conservative government that was
elected in Ontario in 2018 has recently
fallen in the polls on account of its handling
of Covid 19. Initially its
handling of Long-term Care Homes in a pandemic
ended up with horror stories and
the army called in. More recently its handling
of the so called “third wave” essentially
kept Ontario locked down from Christmas to
June. At present Robyn Urbach’s column
in the Globe of June 5th calls
Ford’s recent response the worst. She
talks of a government lurching, more than any
other government in Canada, between
celebrating its reopening plans and dire
warnings of potentially overcrowded
ICU’s and an approach that has kept children
out of classrooms, while advice
was otherwise, And
finally, I
should comment on Covid at the personal level.
Both Pat and I have had our
social routine badly affected. Pat belongs to
several women’s groups that have periodic
meetings. They have been replaced by zoom and
that is just not the same thing –
although better than nothing. We typically
have family gatherings - major
festivals and birthdays – at our Condo. That
ended in early 2020. Also, over
the last few years we have spent January in a
condo on the Mexico coast.
Mercifully, we managed that plus a couple of
weeks in Costa Rica in January and
February 2020 before the Pandemic set in. That
was not possible for 2021. On
the other hand, since we were not in Mexico,
with a bit of pushing from friends
we and our children held a zoom party for our
50th Wedding
Anniversary in January 2021. And we played a
little piece of music we had
recorded for the friends and family who
participated. For
Easter
2020 the family replaced the dinner together
with a zoom call before Easter
Dinner. For Christmas 2020 we arranged a pot
luck dinner but in our individual
homes. Pat and I drove around doing a
distanced collection and delivery of food
items and gifts among our family members on
Christmas Day. I should add that our
daughter arranged several family garden
get-together meals at distanced tables several
times during the summer and fall of 2020, when
such occasions were allowed
under the current guidelines. My
church
choir had its last practice before Easter 2020
and has met on zoom since. Church
was pre-recorded until fall 2020 and since
then has been a zoom service. My church
personnel committee has worked online only.
Two online choir performances have
been produced since Easter 2020. They were
videos - made by assembling and
editing individual recordings, one from each
choir member. The first was for Christmas
2020 and the second was for Easter 2021. The
choir also funded and had prepared
a video performance of a special version of
Psalm 23 and a hymn of thanksgiving
at the request of one of our members who is
ill and who wanted them for her
anticipated memorial. This new skill of
sending individual recordings in for
editing into an online performance has been
learned thanks to Covid. But let me
rush to add that there is no substitute for in
person singing – making music
come to life together. Pat’s
and my
Scottish Dancing which provided physical
activity and social exchanges twice
a week for most of the year, vanished
with Covid. The monthly bigger dances with a
live band and occasional “balls”,
like the New Year’s Eve ball, also
disappeared. The international society based
in Scotland and some of our Toronto dancing
groups have put on zoom dancing get
togethers weekly. We have participated in
several of Scotland’s and most of the
Toronto zooms on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
This has in fact introduced us
to a number of interesting dances we did not
know. However, like choral
singing, there is no substitute for
participating in live Scottish Dancing. Now
I long to try some of the zoom dances in real
life real-time. In addition, creative
Pat got us into a daily dance routine of our
own. She has prepared the Scottish
dance programs. We go for about 45 minutes.
This ensured we got some daily physical
activity beyond our attempts to walk at least
2 km. Yet even for exercise and
movement, live dancing together gets more
relaxed and happy in the crowd. Finally,
Pat
and I returned to playing music together. In
part that started as an idea of a
way to strengthen our lungs should Covid
attack us.
But it reminded us that we used to make
music
in quartets and quintets much of our married
life. However,
we hadn’t done so for probably about
10 years. In
our “lockdown” music-making
Pat and I played two recorders, flute and
recorder, and violin and recorder. We
added a harpsichord to some by recording it
first. We put together a string
quartet for two carols before Christmas (even
though strings are not our
strongest instruments!). Perhaps our best, we
managed to put together Bach’s
Esurientes from the Magnificat for voice,
harpsichord, cello and two alto
recorders.