“How do you want to govern a country where there are 258 varieties of cheese? would have launched General de Gaulle. It’s not just the cheese. After Stéphanie Hariot’s passage to Everybody talks about it, we understand even better why France is such a difficult country to govern.
By her own admission, the pastry chef from Jonquière is “not easy”. We would see her very well among the thousands of women who marched on Versailles to cry out their distress to Louis XVI on October 5, 1789, or even in the crowd who stormed the Bastille.
Civil disobedience should obviously not be encouraged, but one can hardly help admiring the guts of this woman who does not intend to “die slowly” and who dares to do what many others would furiously want to do. do too.
Mme Hariot assures that she has no intention of launching a movement of resistance to sanitary measures, but she nevertheless accepted the invitation of TLMEP. Let’s just say she leads by example.
Over the past two years, thousands of small traders have scrambled to save their businesses, and many have failed. Despite their desperation, they complied with the directives. Out of fear of fines, of course, but also out of solidarity.
However, it must be recognized that the effort demanded of the population has not been distributed equitably. Just as it is easier to endure confinement when you have a chalet rather than a 3 1/2, having to close your business is infinitely more distressing, despite government aid measures, than switching to telework .
It was a feeling of revolt against this two-speed solidarity that prompted the pastry chef from Jonquière to reopen her dining room. In his mind, applying the same rule to a business like his and to McDonald’s or Tim Hortons is actually unfair. We can hardly fault him.
She does not ask to evade the obligation to require the vaccination passport from her customers, as required by hardware stores whose surface area is greater than 1500 square meters, and we can rely on her to enforce health rules at inside his dining room. Woe to him who dares to cheat!
The current of sympathy aroused by the gesture of Mme Hariot translates very well the “bubbling” within the population mentioned by the mayor of Quebec, Bruno Marchand, who invited the Legault government to present a deconfinement plan as soon as possible, as Doug Ford did in Ontario.
“People basically need predictability, to know when things are going to happen,” Marchand said. “Whether through a color system or a calendar, we need to know what the prospect of time we still have to endure before the gradual deconfinement is. »
Mr. Legault is well aware that the vase is about to overflow. It is understandable not to want to create yet again false hopes, but despair could be even more damaging. He will have to take a certain risk, which the drop in hospitalizations now makes more acceptable.
On the political level, the government has every interest in announcing its intentions before the National Assembly resumes its work next Tuesday. It is always better to lead the parade than to appear to be following it. The opposition parties will not fail to criticize him, but they will still have to take into account a thirst for freedom that must be quenched.
In Quebec as elsewhere, the population is resigned to “living with the virus”. The challenge is rather to limit the disadvantages of this cohabitation and to ensure that the health network is better prepared to face the next pandemic. In this respect, the confidence inspired by the Minister of Health is a definite asset in view of the next election, even if the possibility of a true “refoundation” arouses the greatest skepticism.
As infuriating as it may be, the presence of the unvaccinated is also a reality with which we will have to deal. The new awareness campaign led by the Minister Delegate for Health and Social Services, Lionel Carmant, will perhaps help to reduce it, but there will always remain a core of die-hards who cannot be completely banished from the company.