Don’t shirk responsibility

Once again, the Ford government is shirking its responsibility to protect Ontarians against COVID-19. And, once again, private groups are trying to fill the gap.

It happened before when the early rollout of vaccines in the province was so confusing that a volunteer group, Vaccine Hunters, stepped in to help people navigate the system. And it’s happening again as businesses and organizations try to figure out how to reopen safely by, in some cases, limiting access to fully vaccinated staff and customers.

In the absence of any government guidelines or system to do that, businesses are starting to make up their own rules.

Inevitably, that will lead to its own kind of confusion. Even worse, it exposes them to the fury of militant anti-vaxxers who are flooding them with hateful messages, fake negative reviews and other kinds of intimidation. We saw that this week when an online site highlighting businesses with mandatory vaccination policies for staff and customers, safetodo.ca, was forced to shut down. Businesses featured on the site were targeted for online harassment, so its creator decided to halt operations.

The incident shows how vulnerable individual businesses and organizations can be when they’re left to design their own policies and enforce them alone. This ought to be the government’s job. It should develop a provincewide approach to reopening that includes some kind of official certification that a person has been fully vaccinated and poses little risk to others. It should also be prepared to set rules for access if COVID cases start to spike once people return to school and work in September.

That would be the best alternative to bringing in yet more public health restrictions. And, importantly, it would make clear to everyone — including those angry anti-vaxxers — that there’s no point in harassing an individual business or organization. They would just be following official guidelines.

We did that with masks; indeed, we’re still doing it. Public health rules require masking in indoor public spaces, so every shop or business doesn’t have to explain to customers why that’s required on its premises.

The Ford government should assume its responsibilities and design a vaccine passport, or vaccine certification, system that could be invoked if the virus rears its head in the fall. Premier Doug Ford, however, has closed his mind to that possibility. “The answer is no,” he said last week when asked about it.

He needs to think again, and he could start by listening to the thoughtful advice of his government’s own COVID-19 science advisory table.

This week it urged the government to consider bringing in such a system, carefully designed with issues of equity, accommodation and privacy in mind. It’s complicated, which is why the science advisers cautioned against leaving the task up to individual businesses and organizations.

“There are concerns that in the absence of government regulation or direction, organizations and sectors will create their own systems,” they warned.

We’ve written before about the potential upsides of a so-called vaccine passport, or verification, system.

It would give those who are fully inoculated real benefits, in the form of easier access to public spaces. It would give governments an alternative to new restrictions if the contagious variants of COVID run wild in the fall (as they’re already doing in the U.K. and some Southern U.S. states). And it would give the hesitants and the holdouts a new incentive to go out and get their shots.

Now we see another important advantage: shielding businesses and organizations from the rage of the tiny anti-vax minority.

The quicker the Ford government drops its objections, the better it will be for everyone.