Ontario’s Ford Government Turns Fascist To Deflect Blame for Dangerous COVID-19 Spikes

This Should be the Last Draw for this Awful Ford Government. Next Year, They Need to be Swept from Power 

A News Commentary by Niagara At Large reporter and publisher Doug Draper

Posted April 17^th, 2021 on Niagara At Large

Niagara At Large has been strong on the need for those among us who openly flaunt orders or laws around wearing masks or break other common-good efforts to protect all of us from the scourge of COVID-19 to have the book thrown at them.

That is why NAL joins others in congratulating law-enforcement authorities for slapping charges against West Lincoln Mayor David Bylsma, Thorold City Councillor Jim Handley, former St. Catharines regional councillor Andy Petrowski and others for a reckless and dangerous rally they participated in this past April 10^th in St. Catharines.

It does not therefore follow that our bully of an Ontario Premier, Doug Ford, should exploit any support many of us have for charging those who openly violate COVID-19 emergency and ‘Stay-at-Home’ rules with a draconian directive he issued this past April 16^th for police to stop anyone who is out on the road during these perilous times and ask them where they are going and why.

How do we go from charging those who openly break existing COVID-19 rules to playing like Nazi brownshirts and stopping anyone in a car, who may be going to buy groceries for their family or pick up prescription drugs from a pharmacy?

Well only if you have a premier with a longtime reputation as a schoolyard bully like Ford and a Conservative government behind him, that is now looking for any other scapegoats to take attention away from the fact that they have completely blown effectively dealing with this third wave of a COVID-19 crisis.

So now we have this moron of a premier and the morons who stand behind him, including the province’s Health Minister Christine Elliott and the juvenile Niagara West MPP Sam Oosterhoff, now ready to use our police forces to run us down if we even go out on the streets of our communities.

Constitutional experts in Canada are already calling what Ford is attempting to do unconstitutional and according to a recent report on CBC, police departments across the province are, at the very least, calling Ford’s directive, problematic.

In NAL’s opinion, this is just another way of Doug Ford – who has behaved this way going back to his days of playing the tough guy for his late brother and mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford – of looking for scapegoats for his own failings.

It is his way, and his government’s way, of trying to put the blame on the rest of us, for a now-out-of-control, third wave, epidemic catastrophe in this province of his own government’s making.

For months on end, Ford and his government have ignored warnings from working doctors and infections health experts across Ontario not to open businesses too early. Yet, Ford and company, under pressure from their business friends, eased lockdown restrictions, even as far more dangerous, infectious variants of the virus were moving in to the province.

Ford and company have been urged, over and over again, to mandate paid sick days for frontline workers in grocery stores and other venues, but they refused to do this because they can never see themselves regulating their rich corporate friends in that manner.

Ford and company could also not say yes to outlawing private, for-profit long-term-care homes for our seniors, despite evidence that these private homes are where a disproportionate number of our seniors have suffered and died from OVID outbreaks. Instead, they passed legislation protecting these private operators from being sued.

Ford could not even fire or remove that ignorant, arrogant little twerp, Niagara West MPP Sam Oosterhoff, out of his position as an assistant to Ontario’s Education Minister have Oosterhoff openly flaunted mask r-wearing rules at a popular restaurant last year in Niagara Falls.

Instead, you and I – most of us who have sacrificed and stayed at home for most of the past 14 months – now have to worry about being stopped by the police if we go out in our car to get some groceries.

This is the definition of totalitarianism and fascism, and it comes directly from Doug Ford, Sam Oosterhoff and all of the other goose steppers in his government.

We must all rise up now and throw this Ford government out in the spring of 2022.

Ford and company have failed us on fighting this pandemic. Through this crisis, and their ongoing assault on natural heriate that buffer us against pandemics like this, they have proven to be too high a threat to our collective security.

• Doug Draper, Niagara At Large

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