What a roller-coaster ride of a year
Are we getting off in 2022, or will we have to endure all those ups and downs again?
This year is ending much as it began: amid great uncertainty.
The pandemic rages on. Cases of COVID-19 are surging again. A new variant, Omicron, is spreading rapidly, seemingly able to evade vaccines.
Even if the vast majority of Quebecers have rolled up their sleeves and we are living with fewer restrictions on our daily lives, this isn't exactly how we thought 2021 would finish. Most of us thought the pandemic would be over by now. And though it looked, for a while, like we were putting COVID-19 behind us, that turned out to be wishful thinking. The virus — and humanity — had other plans.
The year began in a dark, lonely tunnel. There were lockdowns. We were confined to home and subject to a curfew. It was an unprecedented suspension of civil liberties. But what choice did we have, as we waited anxiously for vaccines to arrive?
Eventually they did come. Quebec worked its way through the age groups, with approval granted to vaccinate teens 12 and over by late spring. Things were looking up. In the sunshine, with many everyday activities resuming, life did feel relatively normal again. Thanks to vaccines, a testament to human ingenuity and scientific prowess, we could breath a bit easier.
But not everyone jumped at the chance to inoculate themselves against a virus that had upended our world. The conspiracy theories and misinformation that spawned such covidiocy as anti-mask protests turned instead toward opposition to mass vaccination, vaccine mandates and vaccine passports. The refusal of a few to use the tools available to protect the many has frayed social bonds and tested patience.
We're only as strong as our weakest link. And even as we are finally able to immunize a greater share of the population, including children ages five to 11 who are now getting their first shot, there has been enough resistance to fuel contagion and allow the virus to mutate.
Western privilege and vaccine hoarding by rich countries have also played a part in the continuation of the pandemic. Though we can count our blessings for our double or even triple protection in Quebec and Canada, the difficulties experienced by poorer countries in procuring doses is a great shame — and self-defeating. Until everyone is safe, no one is safe. The arrival of Omicron drives this lesson home.
The pandemic may have dominated 2021, but there were other notable events.
The climate crisis hit home in Canada with blistering heat in the west. Lytton, B.C., shattered temperature records one day and ignited the next. The fires that swept B.C. forests in the summer weakened the soil. When an atmospheric river dumped diluvian rains on the province in the fall, it flooded the town that just a few months earlier had burned down. These extremes are not felt equally across the country, but they show that the effects of climate change are upon us.
The deaths of Meriem Boundaoui, 15, Jannai Dopwell-bailey, 16, Thomas Trudel, 16, and Hani Ouahdi, 20, in violent homicides in Montreal were a wake-up call that the kids are not all right. The stabbing of a teacher in a school in early December and a rise in gun violence, are alarming signs that a lot more money, time and attention needs to be invested in youth. Not only do we need to prevent at-risk kids from taking up with gangs and picking up guns, we need to save innocent bystanders — like the four victims — who became the tragic faces of this dangerous phenomenon.
Bill 96, Quebec's effort to bolster the French language, was a reminder to English speakers that we can never take our rights or our status in the province for granted. The proposed law seeks to redefine who is an anglophone, enshrine collective rights ahead of individual ones and fend off challenges by pre-emptively invoking the notwithstanding clause. If we can agree that French deserves protection, we are left to wonder why it must come at the expense of minority rights.
Elections in the fall of 2021 resulted in another minority government for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberals and a strong second mandate for Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante. In the midst of turmoil, voters chose the status quo.
If 2021 was a wild roller-coaster ride, it feels an awful lot like we're back where we started from. But are we getting off in 2022? Or will we experience all those ups and downs all over again? If there is one lesson to take from 2021, it's to expect the unexpected. And between pandemics and the climate emergency, normal may now be lurching from crisis to crisis.