Please help us dreamy aging-hippy soggy-minded west-coasters understand what the New new normal is, according to the latest COVID rules.
Please tell us whether we cheered too soon when you bailed out the Wilson Transport bus service which goes up and down Vancouver Island. Vancouver Island is all one Health Authority and we looked forward to going halfway up it from Victoria by bus for an escape to the beach. But if we do that will we, plus the tourist operators we would patronize, be thrown under the very bus you so lately rescued, and be fined for … going on the beach?
If we drive our cars up-island will we find ourselves driving not to the natural outdoors that Dr. Henry says is the safest place curing COVID, but into a Police State? Will we be stopped randomly by cops and fined for going the illegal number of miles away from where we live without knowing what exactly the illegal number is? Or the place we're not supposed to leave (Health Authority? region? community? neighbourhood?) There is something Kafka-esque about all this, you might agree. I pity friends who are trying to raise kids without Nature Deficit Disorder, trying to give them happy childhood summer memories. Excitedly arriving at the campsite in the woods only to find a severely ugly gate shutting them out, won't be happy.
It's not that we deny the severity of the virus, it's not that we aren't afraid of it; the problem is that your shape-shifting instructions and evasive answers to media questions are adding to our stress. Where exactly is my "community" considered to be? How wide, in circumference, is it? Who gets to decide which travel is "essential"? Is it okay for my family to drive up-island to wave at the window of the care home where our 99 year old aunt lives, before she does a Prince Philip on us?
Is it okay for me to deliver the self-published books I sell up-island, since there's no way I could afford the cost of postage? Will the fine I get for driving make the cost of distribution more or less than the cost of postage would be? Does your help for business include help for micro-businesses that struggle along for a decade but make almost nothing? On such knife edges live many of the entrepreneurs not in one of those fields doing well during the pandemic. And the response we get is to be threatened with fines, as if rising costs of everything from groceries to fuel wasn't hardship enough.
"In the same pandemic we're in different boats" you say, Premier. Mine's being shipwrecked on the reef of rising prices and falling income -- and now an expanding reef of fines as well. Thanks for the wise and caring pilotage across the Pandemic Sea.
'Bye Tree -- it was nice knowing you
