So the BC NDP have a new policy of involuntary treatment (at a prison, no less) for people who use drugs, people with mental health issues and people with traumatic brain injury. Involuntary treatment is a terrible idea. What happened to human rights?

It’s so much easier to lock people up, hide them away, and pretend to help them instead of actually helping them. I’m done with this government.

Thank goodness in my riding I can vote for Sonia Furstenau, leader of the BC Green Party. I have an alternative that I can stomach. She issued a statement about involuntary treatment and it is wonderful and right.

Here is a short history of why I’m so done with the BC NDP.

It started shortly after I moved to BC and began engaging with the Health Ministry on the airborne nature of SARS-CoV-2 and the urgent need to inform the public and put proper mitigations in place. After a back and forth and another back, they wrote and said that they would no longer engage with me on this issue. Or on any issue, so it seems. Apparently, they can do that.

I’m going to make a long and disappointing story short and move straight to this past week.

David Eby floated the idea that the carbon tax was something BC wanted to drop. That was the day after Jagmeet Singh of the federal NDP mused about siding with the Conservatives and forcing a carbon tax election. It’s too much. What do they stand for anymore? Nothing.

Side issue: Why do the NDP always swing right? Has this strategy ever worked? I seem to remember it getting Harper elected. Young people and truly progressive people are starving for someone to vote for, someone who cares about the future, and this old person wants the same.

I expect governments to follow science, to do the hard work of debunking misinformation and explaining policy like the carbon tax to voters. Instead, both the provincial and federal NDP are completely giving up and becoming part of the big lie. The carbon tax puts money back in the pockets of most Canadians. For heaven’s sake. It’s their job to explain that.

And without an alternative policy, what is their plan? It appears to be to let the planet fry. We already lost 600+ souls in BC during the last heat dome. The province is on fire every spring and summer. What’s the plan? And don’t get me started on LNG, fracking, pipelines, logging old growth, and all the other environmental disasters still going on all around us.

That brings us to this involuntary treatment nonsense. As a person who is “out there” and very much “on the record” with a traumatic brain injury, I’ll just speak to my own issues, as long as you understand that I realize “involuntary treatment” should never happen to ANYONE.

It should come as no surprise that many people with TBI end up unhoused. It’s a societal and governmental failure on so many levels. I am not unhoused, but only because I have some privilege. And to put someone with a TBI into involuntary treatment is particularly ridiculous because there is not much agreement on what treatment should even be.

What this boils down to is a plan to keep us “difficult people,” (TM) particularly if we are unhoused, out of sight and out of mind. You’d think we were hosting the Olympics or something. (We desperately need a sarcasm font in the world.)

But I’m going to go further. The kind of mind that dreams up involuntary treatment is the same kind of mind that abandons critically ill and disabled people during a pandemic and leaves them isolated in their homes.

The pandemic? Yes, the pandemic. The one that’s ongoing. That thing making everyone sick.

Again, I expect governments to do the hard work, to state the hard truths, to explain SARS-CoV-2 is still making people sick, to tell people when they were wrong when they said it isn’t airborne, to correct mistakes. Yet, there are no mitigations. There is no clean indoor air strategy. There are no tests anymore. Wastewater testing is being scaled back and, in some places, totally abandoned. Funny how if you don’t measure SARS-CoV-2 and don’t test for it, it’s easier to pretend it isn’t there. There is no masking requirement in hospitals. Some places are even banning masks. As long as everyone else gets to cosplay normal, disabled folks like me are forced out of public spaces that are not safe for us. Including hospitals. We are stuck at home. That is involuntary isolation.

Involuntary isolation exists on a continuum with involuntary treatment. They are both ways to make sure disabled and ill people, unhoused people, people who use drugs, and all the “difficult people” (TM) are not seen or heard. The government is now willing to “involuntarily treat” (read “imprison”) drug users, people with mental health problems, the unhoused, and, apparently, those with TBI. Bad enough. But when it comes to covid, we have already been effectively involuntarily isolated.

It’s hard for me not to conclude that they would prefer it if the “difficult people” (TM) and those with comorbidities would just die already. We’re going to die anyway, they keep saying. Not such a tragedy, is the implication. Get on with it is the implicit message. I’d like to remind everyone that we’re all going to die and not a single one of us wants to be rushed to the finish line.

Both involuntary treatment and involuntary isolation are part of the same impulse. That impulse eugenic. It’s fascist. And I won’t vote for it.