It’s time to talk about what COVID did to Toronto, and to us

Posted on June 26, 2025 in Governance Debates

Source: — Authors:

TheStar.com – Opinion/Editorials
June 9, 2025   By Star Editorial Board

We’ve been trying to bury the trauma of the pandemic. But it won’t get better until we talk about it.

The isolation, loss, distrust and disruption that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic continue to make their mark on us today.

Here is the thing about trauma: You can try to forget it. You can pretend it isn’t there. You can do everything in your power to bury it. Just don’t expect it to stay underground.

On Saturday, the Star published an essay by former city councillor John Filion on the four municipal leaders who took this city through COVID-19. We know their faces, all of them: John Tory, Joe Cressy, Eileen de Villa and Matthew Pegg. During the pandemic, we watched them, day after day, answering questions, laying out scenarios, shutting things down and opening them up again.

They were each as public as figures could be in those trying years. But as Filion’s piece makes clear, Tory, Cressy, de Villa and Pegg were all privately suffering in ways we the public — and the media — never saw. All four have since left city government — some more willingly than others. All four spoke openly, and eloquently, to Filion about the personal and professional price each of them paid.

There is a lesson in these stories for all of us, both as individuals and collectively as a city. COVID was a traumatic event for millions in the GTA, as it was for countless others around the world. On the whole, we have not processed that trauma well. We have instead taken all that anger, hurt, sorrow and fear and tried to move on. We’ve tried to go back to being the people — and the city — we were before this happened: before the lockdowns, lost parents and lonely deaths, before the lost jobs, closed daycares and online schools.

We’ve tried to bury it, all of it. We’ve even tried to ignore what a markedly different experience it was for front-line workers, the elderly, the poor, health care workers, and kids and families with young children. But the tainted shoots of all that trauma keep pushing up and out of the ground.

We still don’t know how to acknowledge COVID: neither the heroism, collective sacrifice or loss, nor the mistakes. And there were mistakes. That has to change. We can’t move forward without finding a way to talk about — and process — what went right, what went wrong and what we all suffered during COVID-19.

So how do we do that? How do we begin to heal some of the fractures caused by the COVID pandemic?

Step one is obvious. It’s time for the Province of Ontario to finally commit to a non-partisan, wide-ranging, fully public inquiry into the provincial and municipal responses to COVID-19. There is still so much misinformation out there about what actually happened during the pandemic. We desperately need a collective airing of the facts.

There are practical reasons the province should do this. COVID exposed grave structural problems in Ontario’s public health systems. It showed us to be unprepared and badly co-ordinated between, and even within, all levels of government. There is little evidence the municipal, provincial and federal governments have done much other than paper over those problems since. We know more pandemics are looming. Without an evidence-based assessment of what went right and wrong during COVID we will never be able to deal with what is coming in COVID’s wake.

At the same time, there are broader social and psychological reasons for the province to commit to such a review. People made mistakes during COVID. Some institutions underreacted, some overreacted, most did some of both at different times.

By and large the public servants and health leaders who made those decisions did so for the right reasons. They were operating in most cases under incredible pressure and with imperfect facts. But somehow, in the years since, many people in this city and this country have nonetheless come to believe that they were being lied to during the pandemic, or that they were manipulated by experts intent on doing them harm.

Another reason for a wide-ranging public review, then, is to begin the difficult but necessary work of convincing at least some those fellow citizens that there was no such malintent. We need to talk about it, all of it, before we can start moving back to a collective, public consensus on what is real.

Ideally, that public conversation would spur thousands of private ones. The pandemic changed so many of our lives. It left so many visible and invisible scars. As Filion wrote in his piece, the best therapy — other than actual therapy — for Tory, Cressy, de Villa and Pegg has been talking to each other about they went through. That should be a lesson to all us.

It’s time to talk. It’s time to listen. Nothing will get better unless, and until, we do.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/it-s-time-to-talk-about-what-covid-did-to-toronto-and-to-us/article_18eee884-ab5e-4518-ae41-1fb17105f82c.html

Tags: , , ,

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2025 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Governance Debates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Leave a Reply