One of the protest signs outside the legislature Wednesday used Trumpian language:
“Drain the swamp/
Arrest Bonnie Henry/
John Horgan/
Lisa Helps/
School board”
I considered grabbing a sharpie and adding the name of Jim Benning, the general manager of the Canucks, but decided to refrain.
What good would come from ridicule?
Seriously, Nell Saba acknowledges wrestling with that question. It’s tempting to scoff at the score of demonstrators on the south side of Belleville Street, the ones who oppose the government’s vaccine measures, but what would that achieve?
So, mostly, the 25-year-old just stands on the north side of the street brandishing her own sign — “Vaccines save lives/ Ignorance kills” — just as she has on Wednesdays and Saturdays since Sept. 8.
Saba says she began doing so out of frustration with the messages being pushed by those opposed to the province’s pandemic path. Her presence irked some of them, though. Some suspected she was a plant. “A lot of them accused me of being paid.”
She says one man called her the C-word, taunted her with an offer of $10 for sexual services and was heard to say “I’d kill her if I thought I could get away with it.” A guy her own age, not a regular protester, threw coffee on her, triggered by something she said. She says she has occasionally lost her own cool, flipped a bird in response to a personal attack.
Saba was all alone at first, but was joined by a handful of others after being profiled by CHEK News. On Wednesday, a woman stood at the corner of Belleville and Government waving a sign reading “Honk if you [heart] being double-vaxxed.”
Another vaccine proponent was dressed as Death in a black hood and robe, though in this case, Death had traded his scythe for a hockey stick with a coronavirus model hanging from the blade.
Across Belleville were people holding signs with messages like “Not anti-vax, pro-choice,” “Consent matters” and “Not a lab rat.” One man from that side positioned himself just down the sidewalk from Saba and intoned warnings about Big Pharma, and another called out “COVID’s a scam” to passersby, but for the most part, demonstrators kept to their own side of the street, literally and figuratively.
There is a gulf in what the two sides believe. After all this time, is there a point in more debate? “I’m not going to fool myself into thinking I’m going to change anyone’s mind,” Saba says.
But what, then, to do about the divide between the majority of British Columbians and an increasingly isolated minority?
Most people are pro-vaccine, particularly in the capital region. As of Tuesday, 92 per cent of Saanich Peninsula residents over age 12 had been double-vaccinated, as had 91 per cent in the four core municipalities and 86 per cent in the Western Communities. The figure was 83 per cent in Greater Nanaimo. Cowichan Valley West, at 75 per cent, was the least double-vaxxed part of the Island.
That still leaves a lot of unvaccinated people, though, ones whose lives are becoming more and more circumscribed. They can’t go to restaurants, bars, movies, concerts or Lions games. Beer league hockey teams don’t want them. They can’t travel to Seattle or Vegas or Hawaii, and soon won’t be able to board a passenger plane in Canada.
Jobs are on the line. There has been such an avalanche of workplace vaccine requirements lately — everywhere from Whistler to Our Place to ICBC to B.C. Transit — that it’s hard to keep up.
Federal employees who don’t divulge their vaccination status by Friday could be put on unpaid leave. B.C. health-care workers had to be vaccinated by Tuesday.
Provincial government workers must be jabbed by Nov. 22. Ditto for B.C. Hydro staff (though contractors and sub-contractors have until Jan. 10.) The CRD’s 1,100 employees have until Dec. 13. There are similar rules for municipal workers in Vancouver, Richmond, Kelowna, Penticton …. Ottawa has said those whose refusal to be vaccinated costs them their jobs might not be eligible for employment insurance.
Consider that. They might be wrong, but there are people so convinced they are right that they are willing to walk away from their jobs. Does it do any good to push them further into the margins by calling them crackpots? Has anyone ever changed your mind by sneering at you? No.
Saba has been widely praised as some sort of hero of the kind, calm and safe. That makes her squirm. She says she doesn’t need the pressure of living up to that, that she’s only human and sometimes reacts accordingly. Stoic silence is not always her thing.
Sometimes it’s tempting to resort to ridicule, she says. “But that’s not going to save anyone.”
