Opinion | Doug Ford's COVID-19 dissenters don't get how politics — or science — works – Toronto Star

Three lifelong Tories are in a fight to the political death with Doug Ford over COVID-19.

The premier has pushed them out of the Progressive Conservative caucus, but they are pushing back hard. They have lost their voice in the party, but gained more publicity and notoriety than anonymous backbenchers ever enjoy.

Who wins this power struggle in mid-pandemic? Where do the rest of us fit in?

It is tempting to pick apart the misguided or misleading arguments of York Centre MPP Roman Baber, who went public with his dissent Friday. Or to assail the antimask histrionics of MPP Randy Hillier in eastern Ontario, or rebut the pandemic polemics of Belinda Karahalios in Cambridge, both of whom jumped ship — and jumped the shark — last year.

Baber is the rookie politician who first tried to make his mark by cruelly mocking and publicly haranguing former premier Kathleen Wynne at Ford’s behest in 2018. Now the roles are reversed, with Ford’s Tories deconstructing and demolishing Baber’s arguments on Friday — far better than any columnist could, so no point revisiting them here.

Karahalios, who refuses to wear a mask most days in the legislature, is harder to fathom because she has few followers. But the dissent and descent of Hillier, an aspiring (if not quite inspiring) orator with a fondness for suspenders, has been hard to watch — destructive but also instructive.

A founder and leader of the Ontario Landowners movement — our homegrown collection of anti-government paranoiacs — Hillier was a proud libertarian and parliamentarian who belatedly joined the Tories, only to be bounced from caucus for running afoul of Ford. An eccentric electrician with a soft spot for Tibet and pit bulls, he is now unleashed — leading the charge against mandatory masks.

In normal times, the media love covering the outliers and giving voice to dissidents. People reflexively fault premiers and prime ministers for using their power to muzzle critics, they question the strictures of cabinet solidarity, or they wonder about the demands of caucus consensus over dissidence in our parliamentary government.

But the back and forth reminds us that there is a fine line between consensus and dissidence, between dissenters and fomenters. The trouble with second-guessing is that it works both ways.

Consensus has become a dirty word in our society, but it shouldn’t be confused with conformity and acquiescence. At some point, even in our adversarial system, we need an agreed set of facts and policies or we have alternate realities.

As any political journalist understands, politics is a team sport and parliamentary government depends on cabinet secrecy and caucus solidarity. The point is not merely to keep everyone in line, but to agree on a path forward so that everyone isn’t going in different directions.

Consensus is not only central to political science but pure science. It’s easy to forget that the science of epidemiology — like the science of climatology — relies on probabilities more than certainties.

Climate deniers reject the science of global warming on the grounds that it is not immediately observable like the laws of gravity, so how do we know climate change is real? Weather disasters might seem empirical but are hardly irrefutable.

The real reason people believe in global warming is that we can point to a powerful and enduring consensus among climate scientists — recognized experts who have thrashed out their intellectual disagreements and differing interpretations. It is no accident that the most authoritative work on climate change, emanating from a UN panel, was always described in the media as based on consensus reports from thousands of scientists.

When a lone political wolf like Baber or Hillier challenges the orthodoxy and efficacy of COVID-19 measures, it is easy to question his lack of medical credentials as a backbencher. Instead we turn to the preponderance of scientific expertise that forms our provincial consensus, do we not?

And yet throughout this pandemic there has been a peculiar crusade against the credentials and abilities of the scientific experts contributing to the provincial consensus on combating COVID-19. Often the criticism is directed against one politician, demonizing and personalizing the premier’s performance as if he were single-handedly standing in the way of an otherwise clear path to a COVID-free Ontario (never mind our status as a large jurisdiction with the least COVID-19 fallout on the continent).

The carping and questioning of credentials has also been aimed at chief medical officer of health Dr. David Williams (who was bizarrely accused of being a Ford appointee and lackey — he is neither), or his deputy, Dr. Barbara Yaffe, or the entire roster of epidemiologists and other experts who have come together to find common ground despite their internal disagreements. To watch the public briefing by Ontario’s COVID-19 brain trust Tuesday was to see their clarity and sagacity.

Ford’s government has largely heeded their advice but the critics on both sides believe they know better, or would do better. To be sure, the premier’s mistakes have been well documented, and the experts aren’t always right, but in the clamour about alleged incompetence we are sapping our collective solidarity.

The epidemiological science of COVID-19 is evolving daily, just as the political science of governing in a pandemic remains a work in progress. Public dissent — whether epidemiological, epistemological or political — can be honourable.

Sometimes, though, enduring dissent merely betrays cognitive dissonance — the inability to hold two conflicting thoughts at once: Ford being an unappealing premier to his critics, but capable of making critical pandemic appeals based on the best medical advice.

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