Shawn Whatley, Author at shawn whatley md

Go Ahead, Celebrate Canada!

She lived in the bush outside of Thunder Bay. A single mom with twelve kids (one disabled) and no job.

Her late husband Sam had invested in boat tickets, packed their things in a small trunk, and sailed his family to claim free land west of the Lakehead, in Northern Ontario.

In 1904, he became the first farmer from a family of English fishmongers.

Stalwart Peasants

Parliament needed to settle Canada quickly or lose it to the Americans. Sir Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior 1896-1905, advertised for sturdy immigrants.

Sifton thought that, “a stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, with a stout wife and a half dozen children, is a good quality.”

Sam, “a stalwart peasant,” claimed his land-locked plot of mosquito-infested swamp and softwood outside of what is now Thunder Bay. He moved his clan into a tiny shack and started ‘farming.’

Thunder Bay is Canadian shield. That means rocks, stunted trees, and very little topsoil. For a few years, Sam dragged, rolled, and piled enough rocks to create chest-high windrows around little plots of bare ground.

Then he died. Continue reading “Go Ahead, Celebrate Canada!”

Two Kinds of Suffering: Infectious and Portentous

It is hard to listen. We set out to stay quiet, but questions force into our mind.

Two kinds of suffering shout at us this week: individual and social; infectious and portentous. We face the first at the bedside; the second on the radio.

What do you say when a husband or wife just died? What words help brain cancer?

I talk too much. My inability to fix tightens my throat. So, I blab and reassure to prove I still have breath.

I think myself a listener, but I often cringe later. Blather and repetition. Did I just use logic to eliminate half of their lament?

Job’s friends always impressed me. They sat in silence. Talking ruined their credibility.

Isolated Suffering

The last few months have been hard to watch. Patients deteriorate at home, alone. Elderly who barely coped with a large social network before lockdown became islands during it. Aimed to avoid morbidity and death, social distancing did the opposite, too often.

Maybe hope left long ago. Infection and isolation lay in equal and opposite directions. Scylla and Charybdis.

They had survived on intangible surveillance: a neighbour’s glance, a daughter dropping by. A parade to the mailbox each morning proved they could still do it.

Little neighbourly irritations disappeared in lockdown. They used to show that Mrs. Smith was still feisty, bothersome, and alive.

Collective Suffering

The second suffering comes with the rest of our diet from America. Canada’s social class join in knelt solidarity. We act like a 51st state.

Racism is evil; senseless death worse. Jail seems too good for some. Continue reading “Two Kinds of Suffering: Infectious and Portentous”

COVID-19: A Political Event?

Imagine an asteroid flying towards earth. Is this a political event?

The asteroid might burn up before impact. If it hits the earth, many will die. If it burns up, we see lights in the sky but not much else.

As Prime Minister, what would you do?

Once impact is obvious, who do you save first: the old and frail? White collar workers or blue? How about first responders?

Whom do you let die, when aid runs out? Whom do you send out of the ICU?

Ethicists finally have a new debate. We can forget about runaway trains killing people on track A versus those on track B. Now, we can debate about all the patients killed from treatment denied, for boring things such as cancer, versus those saved from new and exciting things such as COVID-19.

Political Events

Pandemics need public health for populations, medicine for sick patients, and for politics to stand down.

Canada took the opposite approach. PM Trudeau made the pandemic all about politics. If we were in his political shoes, we may have done the same.

The point is not about bad decisions. It was that Trudeau tried to make decisions. He politicized the pandemic and tried to put his party on the right side of it.

Infections and outbreaks are not political events.

Having politicized a response to the threat, politicians cannot depoliticize the outcome. Now, they work to spin the outcome in their favour. Continue reading “COVID-19: A Political Event?”