The COVID-19 catastrophe in Ontario is an utter human rights failure*

There is no other way to describe the current state of affairs when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic in the province of Ontario.  In addition to a massive public health emergency, it is a full scale, unadulterated, scandalous human rights crisis. Provincial government choices, especially in recent days, have deepened the racism and inequities that have haunted the realities of COVID for communities across the province.  People living in neighbourhoods of racialized, immigrant, low-income workers and their families are overwhelmingly the ones who are at greatest risk; are the ones who are the sickest and are the ones most prone to die. 

Solutions that have been widely promoted as essential and certainly rights-regarding – most notably providing more robust paid sick leave when workers are facing COVID at work or at home and need to be able to isolate, or to provide care to family members, without the impossible choice of losing essential income or even their job – continue to be rebuffed by the Ford government.

Instead we saw a staggeringly incompetent, unconstitutional and unjust proposal, pilloried by virtually everyone, to focus on randomly stopping people who are out in public. It was so wrong-headed, particularly in a province with a raw history of racist police street checks, that even police forces immediately made it clear they would not play along. 

While the government did soften the edges of the new policing powers, which had originally granted literally unbridled powers to police to stop anyone at any time, to include a requirement that police have reasonable grounds to believe that a person is taking part in an impermissible gathering, policing and punishment continue to be prioritized over measures targeted on upholding rights and addressing inequality.

Here is the rub.

While this latest disgraceful chapter in Ontario’s COVID response is particularly egregious, it is symptomatic of something wider.  Governments have failed utterly to put human rights at the heart of their approach to the pandemic.  And as this debacle in Ontario makes abundantly clear, that failure exponentially increases suffering and leads to more death.

The sad irony is that at precisely this time last year a group of 302 organizations and experts issued a call to around 75 federal, provincial, territorial and municipal governments across the country, pressing them to – as a matter of urgency – make their COVID responses all about human rights. The groups and individuals endorsing the proposal included human rights, Indigenous, health, environmental, anti-racism, disability rights, women’s human rights and gender equality, religious, labour, civil liberties, refugee and immigration, prisoner rights, international development, anti-poverty, children’s rights, sex worker and many other organizations; as well as law professors, other academics, religious leaders, former politicians and other prominent individual Canadians.

The proposal was focused on the urgent need for human rights oversight and accountability, especially at a time when so many of the institutions, bodies and processes we normally look to for human rights enforcement, including human rights commissions, courts and government, have been operating in a much reduced manner.

There were two very concrete recommendations.

The first was for governments to ensure that the human rights commissions, agencies, offices and advisors relevant to their particular government – such as the Canadian Human Rights Commission for the federal government, the Ontario Human Rights Commission for the government of Ontario, and perhaps the Human Rights Office associated with Toronto’s municipal government – be given a serious and formal advisory role within COVID committees and task forces.  Similarly, Indigenous knowledge-keepers and language commissioners should be meaningfully involved.

The second recommendations was for governments to institute oversight committees made up of “First Nations, Métis and Inuit representatives from both rural and remote Indigenous communities and urban centres, impacted communities, frontline service providers, human rights advocates, labour representatives, academics and other experts”, with a strong mandate to both monitor for COVID-related human rights violations and recommend measures to uphold human rights.

There was very limited response from any government in the country, beyond ‘thank for you for writing’.  The federal government did show some degree of interest and engaged in discussions for several months into the early autumn of 2020, but that went nowhere in the end.  There was absolutely no uptake from the government of Ontario.

As is so often the case, it was clear that once again governments were retreating to their tendency to view human rights as an unnecessary distraction from what they consider to be the real work that needs doing.  Human rights are seen as platitudes, rather than the clear road map they offer.

It is beyond regrettable that a year has been wasted in instituting a human rights framework, including meaningful oversight, for COVID-responses, certainly in Ontario but across the country.  In fact, it is a complete dereliction of the most fundamental responsibilities of government.

Will governments finally take that step?

Or will they continue to leave human rights on the wishful-thinking sidelines?

And fail to deliver equality, dignity and safety to their people, all of their people, at one of the most crucial times in recent history.

It defies belief. Or does it?

 * Photo credit, CP24.