By: Simon Hopkins
After a contentious debate, Ottawa-Carleton District School Board trustees rejected a mask requirement for public school classrooms Thursday evening.
The board held a special online meeting Thursday that followed a public and in-person meeting earlier in the week that was disrupted by members of the public who protested bringing masks back into schools.
Both meetings were organized to discuss a motion by Zone 9 trustee Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth to require masks in schools. Kaplan-Myrth’s motion responded to an increase in respiratory illnesses among children in Ontario. Trustees voted 6-6 Thursday night, and the split wasn’t enough to pass the motion.
The debate comes as the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa (CHEO) has recently opened a second pediatric ICU to deal with the ongoing surge it is facing. People over 16 are also being redirected to other hospitals for emergency and in-patient care.
Doctors from both Ottawa Public Health and the provincial government have recommended people wear masks in indoor settings.
In an interview Friday afternoon, Patrick Fafard, a University of Ottawa professor and expert in public health policy, discussed the changing discourse around health. He explained that pushback to government policies is not new, though how it is being done has changed.
“One of the most effective lobbying campaign tactics is simply to create doubt,” he said.
Loud voices online are using their own evidence to contest the government’s evidence-based decision-making, Fafard said, adding these voices successfully cast doubt on the credibility of public officials.
“It’s all-garbage science, but that’s not the point,” he said. “The point is that people figured a way to appeal to science, to try and find what ultimately is a deeply normative position.”
He further explained that the reality of good science is that it constantly changes and evolves. But for the public, this can look like uncertainty.
Combined with the public level of government that is school boards, a group can greatly influence decisions and outweigh experts’ voices.
Christine Moulaison, co-chair of the Ottawa Carleton Association of School Councils, said she didn’t feel the 6-6 vote in the school board meeting was representative of parents. She said all four of her children were sick with RSV as her local school deals with an outbreak.
Opposition on social media and in-person at the Tuesday meeting, she said, seemed louder than it actually was. “Because they decided to go about it in such an abrupt way, unfortunately, it tends to draw more attention,” Moulaison said.
She felt supporters of a mask requirement weren’t spoken to enough.
Lyra Evans, the board chair, said the disruptive community members who were at Tuesday night’s meeting did not impact her vote.
“I would say that my community has been very in favour of a masking requirement,” she said in an interview Friday, acknowledging that the sentiment varied from region to region, with other trustees finding the opposite.
In Orléans East-Cumberland/Orléans South-Navan, trustee Donna Dickson estimated more than half of the messages she got were from people who were opposed to the mandate.
“When I voted, I listened to the people that voted for me in Orléans,” she said.
She said there had always been long waits at CHEO and other impacting factors to weigh against the advice of officials.
“The government is not telling us to mandate, the doctors are not telling us to wear masks,” she said. “So why is it that when one individual wants to bring that forward, that we should mandate all students when they’ve had this mandate last year – nobody followed it.”
On Nov. 14 Ontario’s chief medical officer of health Dr. Kieran Moore said he is “strongly recommending that all Ontarians, not just those at high risk, wear a mask in indoor public settings.”
Earlier this month, CHEO’s chief medical officer called on members of the community to wear masks to reduce the transmission of respiratory viruses that have led to more children in hospitals.
“Please wear a mask in crowded indoor spaces including schools,” Dr. Lindy Samson said in a public statement issued on Nov. 9.
Update: The spelling of Christine Moulaison’s name was corrected on Dec. 2.
