April 24, 2003
Don't take a sudden coughing fit getting onto an elevator if you live in a close-to- Chinatown highrise in downtown Toronto. The look of panic on the faces of my highrise neighbours just before one of them stabbed the closing door button left me coughing in an empty hallway. The mild coughing fit didn't come from SARS but from one of the ears of a chocolate Easter bunny surreptitiously swallowed and gone down the wrong way.
My one-bedroom apartment at LuCliff in downtown Toronto doubles as the office of Toronto Free Press and CanadaFreePress.com. Surrounded by hospitals and just around the corner from Chinatown, Lucliffe now has several residents on mandatory quarantine.
The local pizza delivery boy said he just drops the pizza box outside their door before bolting back to the elevators.
The morning after the World Health Organization (WHO) blacklisted my city on a no-go travel list, there were only a few more people wearing surgical masks on the streets of my neighbourhood. The donning of surgical masks is nothing new for T. O. As soon as warm weather brings on the smog alert, leftwing politicians like rookie New Democrat Party (NDP) federal leader Jack Layton and NDP provincial leader Howard Hampton are out there wearing theirs with hand-out bulletins declaring that hundreds of people in Toronto are dropping dead on the streets from deadly smog.
The squeegees are doing a brisk business in the downtown having turned in their windshield-washing squeegees for SARS kits, containing latex gloves, a mask and a few anti-bacterial wipes in a plastic bag for "only a sawbuck". It's been a month since the SARS scare erupted but only today the local city council is holding an emergency meeting at Toronto City Hall. As a journalist, covering municipal politics in TFP, I know that a lot of people who watch local meetings on cable television call it The Comedy Hour.
Prime Minister Jean Chretien is back from the Dominican Republic where he and wife Aline lunched with Bill and Hillary Clinton on Easter Monday. The serving Prime Minister and Paul Martin, the PM-in-waiting have a lot of clout through their close connections with UN Kofi Annan spot man Maurice Strong. One telephone call from either one to Maurice would have Toronto removed from WHO' blacklist.
Layton said it's "not likely Chretien will get SARS in the Dominican." Problem is, the Canadian Prime Minister doesn't get much of anything.
A lady called my office in tears to tell me that as a resident of Toronto she was informed she and her husband would not be welcome on a cruise her children had paid for in honour of their parents' 40th wedding anniversary. "It took my son and daughter more than a year to save up for this cruise," she said. "When the telephone call came from the travel agency, I felt like a leper," she said.
There has not been a single story about a SARS survivor in the Canadian mainline media. It won't take much for the media to create a public panic.
Meanwhile, some people are getting antsy from being blacklisted in Toronto.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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