Pandering premier puts trolley on dangerous track Stefanson’s ‘new normal’ puts lives of vocal minority ahead of everyone else, including vulnerable Manitobans By: Dan Lett Posted: 7:00 PM CST Friday, Mar. 4, 2022 Last Modified: 9:23 AM CST Saturday, Mar. 5, 2022 Updates

Opinion

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This article was published 03/03/2022 (1027 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Which side of the “acceptable loss” divide are you on?

If you count yourself among those who are too old, sick, disabled or deliberately unvaccinated to survive COVID-19, then you should know that your political leaders have just decided you are an acceptable loss.

Think that’s an exaggeration? Consider the changes to public-health orders here in Manitoba.

Notwithstanding the fallacious reasoning that many scientific and medical experts believe is at the heart of her statement, there is a fundamental omission from Stefanson’s argument: an admission that in removing virtually all pandemic restrictions this month, she is sacrificing the lives of some Manitobans to ease the burden on others.

This week, the province dropped the vaccine requirement for admission to certain indoor places and events, and for health-care workers and educators, essentially allowing unvaccinated people to go anywhere and do anything that fully vaccinated people can do. Later in the month, Manitoba is expected to drop the indoor mask mandate and requirements for symptomatic people, or those who test positive for COVID, to isolate.

According to Premier Heather Stefanson, pandemic restrictions “have placed many burdens on Manitobans, and now that we see the pressure of our hospital systems starting to ease, it’s our responsibility of government to ease those restrictions on Manitobans.”

Notwithstanding the fallacious reasoning that many scientific and medical experts believe is at the heart of her statement, there is a fundamental omission from Stefanson’s argument: an admission that in removing virtually all pandemic restrictions this month, she is sacrificing the lives of some Manitobans to ease the burden on others.

Again, not an exaggeration. Stefanson has argued the harm from restrictions has finally outweighed the negative consequences of COVID-19. She is not denying there will be some negative consequences, only that they will be acceptable losses in the campaign to benefit the greatest number of people.

Will removing restrictions now hurt some people? There is no way to get around the fact that allowing people, regardless of vaccine status, to occupy indoor spaces in unlimited numbers with no mask requirements will lead to more infections. And with more infections, we have the certainty of that some of us will get seriously ill and some of us will die.

And therein lies the tradeoff that Stefanson is willing to make on our behalf: a smaller loss of life in exchange for a greater degree of freedom.

The premier might be able to justify her strategy on moral and ethical grounds if — and it’s a big ‘if’ — she would admit what she’s doing and reveal the modelling that shows the consequences of her strategy.

“The cost is high for all of these decisions and they (the premier and her advisers) know generally what those costs are,” said Arthur Schafer, director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba. “They have all the modelling to tell them who will be hurt by what they’re doing. And they are weighing and balancing all of the potential costs and benefits.

“The cost is high for all of these decisions and they (the premier and her advisers) know generally what those costs are.” – Arthur Schafer, director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the U of M

“But they’re not telling us what the tradeoffs are. They’re not telling us how many people will get sick, will require hospitalization or will die as a result of these decisions. And without knowing what they know, how can we judge what’s going on?”

Schafer agreed that Stefanson is currently confronted by what philosophers and ethicists call a “trolley dilemma,” an exercise that forces us to confront our moral and ethical values when life is at stake.

The classic trolley dilemma scenario presents a runaway tram with two possible routes: the first involves staying on the existing track and killing five people; the second would see a driver or bystander to hit a switch that would put the tram on a different track that would kill one person. Which option would you choose?

The global pandemic provides, in essence, one big trolley dilemma. Remember when physicians in some countries were forced to take away respirators — which were in extremely short supply — from critically ill COVID-19 patients? In that situation, the physicians decided to deny a respirator to someone who wasn’t going to recover, in order to save the life of another patient who had a fighting chance. This is a real-world example of a single life being sacrificed to save countless others.

The problem here in Manitoba, and in many other jurisdictions around Canada and the world rushing to eliminate pandemic restrictions, is that in the COVID-19 trolley dilemma, there are more than two tracks.

We should not be trapped in an either (restrictions) or (no restrictions) equation. There is absolutely no reason why the “new normal” that Stefanson describes cannot feature vaccine and mask mandates. For hundreds of thousands of Manitobans, vaccines and mandates are already a new normal, one that they are not keen to ditch.

When you consider that there are more than two tracks here, it raises questions about who is actually making a sacrifice in Stefanson’s post-pandemic world.

The problem here in Manitoba, and in many other jurisdictions around Canada and the world rushing to eliminate pandemic restrictions, is that in the COVID-19 trolley dilemma, there are more than two tracks.

In terms of loss, isn’t it more acceptable to ask a handful of unvaccinated health-care workers to forfeit their jobs in order to protect some of the thousands of elderly and ill patients in Manitoba hospitals and personal-care homes? Is it not more acceptable to prevent the unvaccinated from attending movies and hockey games to protect the much larger constituency of fully vaccinated people?

Stefanson believes she is sacrificing a few for the benefit of many.

In reality, she and her government are willing to sacrifice many by pandering to the few.

dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com

Dan Lett
Columnist

Born and raised in and around Toronto, Dan Lett came to Winnipeg in 1986, less than a year out of journalism school with a lifelong dream to be a newspaper reporter.

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