Waiting is the hardest part, but necessary

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/03/2021 (2022 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“Dr. (Brent) Roussin has his head in the sand. Has Dr. Roussin sat in a restaurant lately? Has he talked to a restaurant owner lately? He’s completely oblivious to what’s going on in Manitoba right now.”

— Brandon Chamber of Commerce president Spencer Day

“For Mr. Day to say Dr. Roussin has his head in the sand, is an uncalled for, and condescending remark.”

— A comment on the Sun Facebook page

 

If there was ever proof that our business community is getting incredibly frustrated with the province’s pandemic restrictions, Brandon’s own Spencer Day made that abundantly clear in his comments to a Sun reporter last week.

In a followup interview with both The Brandon Sun and the CBC this week, Day apologized for the ill-considered remark above, saying that his words were out of line, and that his comments “should have been directed at the premier.”

“I do think those comments should have been directed at the premier,” Day said on Monday. “And the premier has been very vocal about that since the start of the pandemic and I don’t think it was fair to direct that to Dr. Roussin on my part.”

The comments were initially meant to criticize the fact that restaurants were being told by Manitoba Health officials that owners and employees would have to ask patrons for their IDs to verify that they were from the same family — an order that was changed late last week to allow restaurants to instead get diners to sign a declaration that they were from the same household. As the restrictions currently stand, restaurants can still verify photo ID if they wish.

We have ourselves on this page criticized both Dr. Roussin and the premier for poor planning, bad decisions, ill-timed outbursts and the like, so certainly Mr. Day and his frustrations are not alone.

And he’s not entirely wrong, either — the situation was handled poorly by the province, and businesses will suffer for months, possibly years to come.

And there are certainly many in the public who share this frustration too, both in and beyond the business community. On a near daily basis, it’s not hard to find angry social media comments on any news story we post saying that the government is trying to eliminate freedoms, hurt business, destroy the economy and society, and so on. Considering our province is run by a characteristically business-friendly Progressive Conservative premier who shows outward signs of Libertarian leanings, these kinds of harsh musings are simply far-fetched.

But trying to deny the reality of just how difficult this past year has been does an injustice to the pain being felt across the country. Not only have the majority of us been stuck at home for several months without the chance to mingle with our friends and families — at least those of us following the provincial restrictions, at any rate — the pace of reopening our society and our businesses has been achingly, but necessarily, slow.

It’s a little like carefully pulling off a smelly bandage that covers a cut that may not have fully healed. You don’t want to make things worse by recklessly ripping open a wound by mistake, but the bandage really stinks and needs to be removed, and the wound aired out.

And so we find ourselves at a crossroads in our COVID-19 struggle. A battle-weary society that is impatient, sad, angry and growing more ill-mannered by the day, and seeing potential relief on the horizon as the vaccines roll out — again, painfully slow as our province and country come to grips with poor planning by our federal government — is watching in disbelief as Prairie Mountain Health continues to post low-to-no new cases of COVID-19, yet remains under code-red restrictions.

We understand that disbelief, but we also recall hearing and reading numerous reports last fall of people in red zones leaving for orange zones — like we were — or going Christmas shopping in Saskatchewan to get around the province’s health restrictions. For this reason, we find it unlikely that the province will return to a more regional approach to these restrictions, and that we will have to remain patient while the vaccine effort continues, and the province proceeds with reopening plans for our business community — thankfully more cautiously than it did last summer.

This is not going to be an easy wait. Not hardly. But we need to see this through. Again, the last thing we need to do is find ourselves in a third wave of this blasted virus.

Just how bad for business would that be?