To the Editors,
One would have hoped that Leslyn Lewis, the Toronto lawyer newly-arrived in our community and recently elected as our MP, might have taken this time before the convening of Parliament to get to know our people and our issues a bit better in order to prepare herself for representing our interests in Ottawa.
Instead, she has taken to social media to cast doubt on the value of COVID vaccinations for younger people, saying it is using children as “shields,” and conjured up a “right” to refuse to disclose her own vaccination status as required by the Speaker and the multi-party Board of Internal Economy, a measure taken to protect other MPs and staff from COVID.
She has even used racially-charged language, saying the requirement is akin to a “lynching” or being told to “sit at the back of the bus.” What is going on here? Can it be that she is pandering to the anti-vaxxers in the Conservative Party to exert pressure on her own leader, Erin O’Toole, whom she unsuccessfully challenged for the leadership of her party, positioning herself for a future leadership bid? Regardless, what she really needs to do is get serious and get to work to do the job she was elected to do.
Greg Crone,
Caledonia
To the Editors,
During the recent Federal election, the six candidates were each asked specific questions about their positions on certain issues. When asked about vaccinations against COVID, five of them gave direct answers. The exception was the Conservative candidate, who gave an evasive reply about being concerned about public health and that she was being tested every day. She gave no details about that daily testing, and we were left to take her word for it.
It seems, however, that now she is safely in office, and the taxpayers are saddled with a bill for well beyond a million dollars over the next four years, she has no qualms about coming clean and revealing what was only suspected from her evasive answer. So not only did she try to make issues of gas wells and the Provincial deficit, which are concerns of Queen’s Park and not Ottawa, she avoided coming clean on the only Federal issue about which she was asked!
Based on her recent tweets, she wants to equate herself with Rosa Parks, who is notable for taking part in a scripted and orchestrated act of disobedience in December 1955 to call attention to Civil Rights. And as part of her taking on the role of Crusader Rabbit, she also appoints herself as spokesperson for mothers who don’t want their children to get the vaccine, which suggests to me that she is looking for allies of her own position, rather than running to the support of any freedom of choice group.
Back in August, when I suggested that the vaccine, if it worked, would only protect the person vaccinated and do nothing to stop the spread of the virus, I was dismissed as an uninformed idiot. But others, including Ms. Lewis, are now saying similar things. Whether or not someone gets vaccinated, therefore, would be up to them, if they chose to risk infection and its consequences. If someone is infected, however, depending on the severity of their symptoms, the treatment of those symptoms becomes the ultimate responsibility of the public health system, which is funded by the taxpayers.
But when an MP can expect to receive salaries and expenses of more than $300,000 a year, a little fact like costs to OHIP of a few thousand dollars for each patient wouldn’t seem like much.
So those that elected her, not on the basis of issues but rather “No Trudeau”, should maybe rethink their decision, especially since if the non-vaccinated are excluded from Parliament as suggested, Haldimand-Norfolk may not even be represented on The Hill! Now she’s shown her true colours.
Bruce Burton,
Canfield
