Last year, at the start of the first curfew, these pages told the story of Maria and Carlos, workers in their sixties and without status, forced to go to work five hours before the start of their night shift. , for fear of being arrested by the police. “We wait a few hours locked in a storage room for cleaning products to avoid being seen, sometimes we sleep on the ground,” they confided.
Their story was not unique. Several groups denounced the effects of the curfew on workers in an irregular situation who perform essential tasks, but poorly paid, and who cannot run the risk of being arrested by the authorities on their way to work.
There was also the shock wave in the world of homelessness. From the first days of the curfew, the concerns expressed by the workers materialized: refuges full, outbreaks, people forced to hide to sleep or use drugs, sometimes at the cost of their lives. A year later, there is still a shortage of shelter space, and everyone has one more year of pandemic exhaustion in their bodies.
Last winter, shelters for women victims of violence stepped up public relations operations to remind people that despite the curfew, it is not forbidden to flee. Despite everything, the risks of violence have increased. There were 18 feminicides in 2021 in Quebec, an exceptional burst of violence. To this day, shelters are overflowing.
These stories support the human cost of the government’s “message” with the curfew. The scientific basis for this measure is doubtful, it is now clear, but for a panicked government, it is a godsend. We give the impression of moving heaven and earth to “protect the health network”, while making people pay the price that we rank anyway on the side of the surplus, the transgression, the ‘invisibility.
When the curfew was announced on December 30, it was mind-boggling to see the story of a supposedly rational escalation in resources being picked up as it is. The field was open: it was enough to invent a logical progression from the precedent created last year, and to declare that we were “there”. You are not going to quibble for your late night walks!
I never cease to be stunned that the opposition to the curfew is qualified as a privileged whim. On the contrary, it is necessary to enjoy extraordinary comfort in order to consider mobility as an individual preference. To declare oneself “neither for nor against” or “ready to try” is not a neutral and voluntary posture: it is a bias in favor of a gesture of violence towards populations which already undergo a lot of it.
Rights and freedoms are not just symbolic tools that comfort the ideals of people who confine themselves to the calm of their homes. They protect those who live on the margins, who do not have the luxury of peaceful confinement. Those for whom the shrinking of public space and the freedom of movement as well as the multiplication of control and surveillance measures compromise the possibility of putting food on the table, of going through another winter.
I wonder who this makes you feel better, when you no longer even shy away from ordering healthcare workers, workers in general, and especially low-paid workers, to work when they are sick. The shortening of the quarantine period and the rationing of PCR tests were announced without much noise, a few days after the return of the curfew, to the applause of the Employers Council. The petticoat does more than exceed, it remains only him: the management of the pandemic comes down to a sordid alloy of repression and productivity at all costs.
Beyond the curfew, everything indicates that the discourse on “life with COVID” is being built along the same horizon. “Life with COVID” means for now that artists, small entrepreneurs, bar, kitchen, restaurant and event workers have gone bankrupt or changed jobs. That women health workers have “got used” to a new layer of disaster. That teachers have “got used” to choose between the permanent risk in their poorly ventilated classrooms and the erosion of the bond with their students. This means that the sick, the inmates, the old have “got used” to loneliness, that friendship has become a seasonal activity and the home the only valid place of sociality.
It is about a clear desertification of our forms of existence in common; just subtle enough that we can tolerate the pain of the loss, but not feel empowered to desire anything else.
Of course, the hour is dire, and healthcare workers carry a titanic burden on their shoulders, made worse by the wear and tear caused by decades of neglect. Except that I wonder how far we will accept measures more spectacular than scientific, which prepare a society where democratic protest is a farce, and where only the slogan of the bosses succeeds in bending the discourse of necessity.