← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Frederick William I
Thread ID: 6376 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2003-04-28
2003-04-28 17:24 | User Profile
Comical Ali Surfaces in Toronto
Twenty-six countries followed suit when the World Health Organization (WHO) advised against travel to Toronto -- the world's most multicultural city. The news would flush a lot of absentee politicians out of the woodwork -- people who'd hoped licking the floor at Speedy Dim Sum was all posterity would ever ask of them. It also inspired a display of apoplexy that would transfix the world. People already leery of Toronto can not have been reassured by the spectacle of a befuddled-looking mayor bawling and shaking his fist, unsure of his facts and losing his place as he read. There was the bizarre exchange between hizzoner and Toronto's Chief Medical Officer of Health Sheila Basrur. "WHO," she coached, sotto voce. "Who?" he whispered back, bufuddled. "WHO!" she said coaxingly (culd he really not know who WHO was?) "Who?" he responded. After more than a month of epidemic spread, it takes an unusual kind of mayor to admit he hasn't a clue who or what WHO is: glaring at the media, his worse-ship demanded, "Where did this group come from?"
There's more, all of it establishing similar benchmarks of excellence. Anne McLellan, the only federal health minister to have a whatever-happened-to story written about her while still in office, raised her head above the parapet just long enough to pronounce the WHO decision "inappropriate." There's that spinsterish word of sniffing disapproval, so essential to politically correct communication. Between the health minister and the mayor, we're beginning to wonder if there isn't merit in the Chinese system after all. Our premier Ernie "Oilcan Ernie" Eves, having dragged himself back from golfing in Arizona as the SARS crisis raged, has announced compensation packages for those in quarantine -- something we might have expected from the federal government, assuming we expected anything at all.
Back from his crisis-dodging Caribbean golf tour, the prime minister's answer to Toronto's economic malaise is to send his wife on a shopping spree. Let 'dem eat da cake. With not very well disguised with not very well disguised regret, the PM tossed $10-million into the Toronto advertising fund, warning suffering human beings not to expect a button more from Ottawa (current federal surpluses run to $14-billion). Check out this ridiculous comment (we assume he'd been asked about taking holidays while Rome burned) "So I took a few days of holidays, like I have the right to do, but I'm always the prime minister 24 hours a day. I have a perfect system ... I am in communication with everybody faster than you are." So there? That masterful retort must have wowed the WHO watchdogs in Geneva!
A Lesson From Hong Kong.
Contrast Hong Kong's "Financial Secretary Antony Leung. The government will rebate HK$2.3 billion of salaries tax to more than 1.2 million taxpayers. They will receive a cheque of a maximum of HK$3,000 around August. ... He conceded that the tax rebates might not have a significant impact on consumer spending, but it was a necessary measure, and important to lift the mood of the people." (The China Standard, April 24, 2003) Not the pocketbook, anything but the pocketbook! Hey, if the Canadian people want to lift their spirits, they can eat Chinese food. It's not like they haven't been told often enough.
It's The Money, Not the People, That Count.
It is worth noting that while Chinese restaurants from San Diego to Paris report diminished sales, it is only in Toronto's hot zone that people are all but frog-marched to the table with a cattle prod. However the disaster crests or slumps, the one constant throughout has been the steady, drumbeat condemnation of Canadians as mean spirited racists. If you can get past the annoyance factor, this is actually a fairly interesting phenomenon. Most of us realize that our governments generally perform exceptionally well when they're breeding disaster; for them to now try their hand at containing one of this magnitude is obviously terra incognita: witness Mel Lastman. What we find so disgraceful is that, so long as mere people were suffering and dying in a surreal visitation of some kind of Oriental Andromeda Strain epidemic, Ottawa, Queen's Park, and even Toronto city council were disengaged to the point of catatonia.
Once the World Health Organization fingered us, the spectre of vacant hotel rooms and empty T-shirt shops had our politicians leaping for the panic button. A certain type of Canadian, a lot of politicians and CBC "personalities" like to imagine we are a morally superior breed to those fill-in-the-blanks south of the border. Yet, it was Americans who remembered their dead, honoured their heroes, and contemplated the ruin of their World Trade Center with an almost unbearably moving decency. Apart from anti-racist lectures delivered from mosque podiums, our enduring 9/11 image is of the prime minister issuing a series of bizarre pronouncements from beneathe the dust-ruffle at 24 Sussex Drive -- or is that just our fond recollection?
The current gimlet-eyed fix on the bottom line, rebranding and regaining our market share of motor coach, hospitality and convention dollars -- on the very days four more deaths were announced -- is not just unseemly, but most unlikely to win back very many tourists. If our politicians really are such calculating insects, can't they at least be smarter calculating insects and pretend to care about human beings? We notice the "materialistic" Americans did not set up market stalls on the WTC's still smoking rubble. This Uriah Heep-like devotion to the almighty dollar is evidently the only "value" our politicians understand. Sensing that there might be a certain perception of grubbiness about their preferred form of worship, they are quick to leaven it with the only "moralism" they understand -- anti-racism. Here is the ugly reality born of politicians who see the polity as a soulless Lego kit composed of interlocking and interchangeable worker/consumer units.
WHO was Right
If local health officials are less histrionic, they are just as agitated by the WHO bulletin. Even the estimable Dr. Donald Low insists this is a political sop to Beijing. But wasn't the decision based on three criteria: overall numbers, local transmissions, and, of greater significance to a global outfit, exportation of cases? >From WHO's perspective, we can see that exporting SARS to some place like Burundi could depopulate the nation and possibly the continent -- perhaps even set off a worldwide pandemic. Our immigration and refugee policies are hardly a secret. Does WHO consider Toronto a much more likely exporter of persons travelling to the world's most benighted destinations than other epidemic hot zones? It is a logical conclusion. WHO had, in fact, asked Canada to screen departing passengers -- health minister Anne McLellan pronounced that idea "inappropriate" too. There is a curious blind spot here: "The WHO has pointed to Toronto for 'an exportation' of a SARS case which then led to a cluster of five cases in another country ... but Canadian officials say their information doesn't jibe with this." (Globe and Mail, April 24, 2003)
Ironically, this is one of the few areas of the SARS debacle that has not been shrouded in secrey: "Cases of SARS have already been exported from Ontario to the United States, Australia and the Philippines, WHO's [head of global outbreak and alert response unit, Judy] Hall said. And WHO is investigating a possible case that may have been spread to Bulgaria, she said. The three cases exported to Australia and the one case to the United States were identified quickly and isolated with no further spread, she said. But the traveler to the Philippines appears to have infected at least one other person there, she said. [The woman, a nursing assistant died, as did her father] Another 60 contacts who are showing no symptoms of the disease have been isolated and are under observation." (CNN, April 25, 2003)
That Canadian officals claim no knowledge of this cannot fail to impress WHO. Was the nurse perhaps a member of the overwhelmingly Filipino BLD? Was she illegal, and, therefore, not officially resident in Canada at all? Does the WHO realize just how slovenly immigration "controls" are in Canada? That there is no domestic "tracking" of immigrants and refugees at all? That in matters ethnic and racial, Canada habitually lies not just to its own citizens, but to the rest of the world in order to pin a happy face on the shambolic disaster?
Why Not Tell Canadians the Truth for a Change?
Did this more subtle problem contribute to the advisory? If WHO believes our officials are more concerned with whether we eat in Chinese restaurants than with telling us the unvarnished truth, we can certainly understand the misgivings -- we share them. The failure to publish names and photographs of quarantine breakers is quite the oversight where quarantines are meant to be voluntary. All any GO-train commuter knows is that the symptomatic nurse, who travelled toward the Appleby station Easter week was female. Little wonder only one contact has managed to unscramble the riddle and step forward. No doubt many hundreds are simply worrying themselves sick and counting days.
There is also an inability on the part of Canada's political class to quite acknowledge that SARS was imported from China. Unaware of Canada's little journalistic quirks, Reuters reports: "Canada has 330 cases of SARS and 16 deaths, most of them in Toronto, which has a large Chinese population." (April 24, 2003) The people we look to for information have never been quite able to admit that Scarborough Grace Hospital is a largely Asian hospital situated in an overwhelmingly Asian neighbourhood -- Agincourt -- or Asian-court in the vernacular.
Jim Karygiannis, the area MP, told CBC Newsworld that 4 schools were closed in his riding and that close to 6,000 of the 8,000 or so quarantines had occurred there in his riding. Pattern? What pattern? Add to these quarantine rates the fact that CNN reported April 23 "more than half of the 139 probable SARS cases involve health care workers," and it has quite a damping effect on the threat level to the general population. The sense of panic might not have been quite so widespread had people had just a little more information with which to develop a perspective. Instead, officials berate frightened people for overreacting, butof course, they know the facts -- we don't.
Torontonians have been living under the insupportable stress of fretting about this for over a month now. Would a little honest information have lightened that burden for the vast majority? Undoubtedly, but that's not how things work in Canada. The important thing is not just to eat Chinese food, but to be seen eating Chinese food.
Dropping the Ball
On February 11 -- that's a full ten days before the infamous Dr. Liu coughed on a group of people at Hong Kong's Hotel Metropole (which by the way, used to promote its 'breathtaking' view) -- an alert describing a dangerous new form of virulent pneumonia in Asia "went out over ProMED, a global network originally set up a decade before by a group of American scientists to quickly alert the globe to emerging diseases. Twenty thousand people received the ProMED alert, distributed free to anyone who signs up. Toronto Public Health authorities saw it. They distributed information to Toronto hospitals. Since Toronto has an incredibly diverse population, with a large Asian community that might travel to the area, it was vital information. The alert was also seen by some top Toronto disease experts, such as Dr. Donald Low. But the alert and others that followed didn't make an impact. (Scarborough Grace, where Toronto's outbreak began, refused to answer detailed questions for this story, including whether they received the various alerts.) 'WHO just doesn't send these things out everyday. It was obviously significant. You think about it half a world away, which is obviously the wrong thing to think,' said [Dr. Donald] Low." (Toronto Star, April 19, 2003)
Tse Chi Kwai (fatality # 2, the son of the woman who brought SARS to Canada) was admitted to Scarborough Grace on March 7: it was not until the hospital's infection control officer called Dr. Alison McGeer on March 13 (when Tse died) that the penny dropped: McGeer remembered the ProMED alerts. Although Tse was in an isolation room, the hospital had operated for five full days with minimal barriers in place and family visiting. The ProMED alert -- and updates -- had then been circulating for a month. No wonder Scarborough Grace refused to answer the awkward questions.
**Note Further updates will not include the word SARS in subject line. As if the real thing were not enough, some enterprising troglodyte has devised a computer virus in which SARS is a key word.