I felt a range of emotions yesterday as I listened to the news reports announcing new restrictions on what we are allowed to do. I had arrived at another gym, which I just joined for the winter in an effort to not only keep mentally and physically healthy but prepare for some competitions in the summer and fall, while I am still able.

Like many I am tired, and like some I am angry. I have no more patience.

When this all started two years ago, it was perplexing as to how people refused to wear masks or wash their hands or follow common sense health guidance. When the vaccine came, it was mesmerizing how people had collective amnesia with regards to the litany of shots they already have HAD to receive. I realized that most don’t have our frame of reference, having lived through SARS and various other outbreaks in a society that respects health professionals and trusts government. These measures and more feel normal to us. We have improved.

Being a small place surrounded by water with restricted points of entry we seemed to do well. Round-abouts were built, hockey rinks announced, pay raises for government were approved, and most importantly few got sick. Like before, you still needed to wait 6 months to get an ingrown toe nail clipped, and years to see a paediatric specialist. Life was as it was but with the added regime of limiting your contacts or booking your time in a gym (travel was somewhat a no no).

I assumed that like health care professionals, and many others, surely the government has been working to exhaustion to prepare for an outbreak, right?

That assumption has proven to be patently false.

It’s not a question of money, it’s a question of priorities and competence. My son today cannot attend school, cannot train in the pool, and cannot go to his CrossFit gym. But he is free to add more shifts at his service job. He is safe while increasing the profits for corporate but not while preparing himself for the future? Not a good look.

I see no strategy or long term plan, only tactics. If there is one, it isn’t being communicated which is in itself another failure.

A crisis is a sure test of leadership for which this provinces leadership is failing. Now I turn this angst to something productive, the one thing we can do, work, at least until election time, when I hope to devote myself to making sure these people don’t continue to serve.