50,000* dead? Never happened

Canada erases its present in real time

To help you visualize 50,000 people, imagine all of the people in this stadium, dead.

If you search on Google for the number 50,000 in Canadian news this past week, there aren’t too many stories that pop up:

• Carbon tax will kick in for polluters after 50,000 tonnes of carbon.

• Tickets for some NFL thing have already surpassed 50,000 sold (thanks, I guess, TSN)

• Hardwood Ski and Bike gets about 50,000 visitors each year.

• There are more than 50,000 kilometres of trails and roads in BC and Alberta and a quarter of them don’t appear on maps.

• A green comet will flash past earth for the first time in 50,000 years.

There are a few others but you get the idea

There are two stories that mention 50,000 for a different reason. A more historical and significant reason.

Only two.

Global News’ Sean Boynton and the Hindustan Times’ Anirudh Bhattacharyya have written what appear to be the only two articles that announce that Canada has surpassed 50,000 COVID-19 deaths. Boynton’s piece was published Monday afternoon EST and Bhattacharyya’s piece was published Tuesday afternoon IST.

Both articles report plainly report the numbers. You remember, the kind of journalism that was a daily occurance for 2020 and 2021.

And that’s it.

We didn’t pass this threshold on Monday or Tuesday. It happened late last week, likely Thursday (data is rarely exact from day to day). No one seemed to notice on Friday. There’s no journalism produced in Canada on Saturday and Sunday so I guess the news breaking at the end of the news day on Monday could be considered fast?

I noticed this and added it to my regular case count updates on Twitter. I noticed Sunday because I just hadn’t had time before then to look.

Nora Loreto @NoLore

That's right -- Canada has surpassed 50,000 official deaths. This would have happened on January 19. Where's the fanfare? Where's the public mourning, grieving? Forget pretending this is over -- we are collectively pretending that it never happened.

It wasn’t just journalists who didn’t notice or who don’t care. There were no lamentations from Justin Trudeau. No characteristically chopppy tweets from Jagmeet Singh. No video made with the help of a selfie stick from Pierre Poilievre. No statement from the Public Health Agency of Canada. No premier pointing this out. No comment from provincial opposition leaders. Nothing from Bell, Deloitte, Rogers, Telus, CNRL, Irving, Suncor, Teck, Extendicare or Revera or any of the companies who run this fake country.

Nothing.

While people rage at the suggestion that the pandemic is over, the actual lie peddled by politicians, media and corporations alike is that the pandemic never happened. That there was a black hole from 2020 to 2022, some bad stuff happened but let’s not talk about it.

It’s as if the entire country’s political, professional, business and media class are acting like a singlular being who desperately needs therapy to process what just happened, but instead, is doing everything he can to forget a recent trauma.

The problem is that these things combined do not equal a solitary man. The forgetting is intentional. It’s *political* and it’s intended to not allow us to collectively process what just happened. Because if we were allowed to process it, we would develop solutions to ensure that things get better.

Critically, we can not be allowed to understand this moment. And so, thanks to mass media and social media and the strings pulled by corporate overlords through both channels, we live forward with our backs towards the future, always looking behind us at what just came. But we do not process the past, we only look at it. Because of this, it’s difficult for most people to understand the moment in which we live. With our backs against the future and our heads looking back (or not looking at all), we cannot understand the confusing and changing present.

The only way to grasp the current moment is not by looking back or forward, but by standing still and listening, seeing, feeling, perceiving and looking all around.

This is an era where participatory democracy is an illusion. The ideals on which our system was based have been so throughly hollowed out that we are left standing on unsteady and soon-to-give-out ground. We have no influence over the system that controls us. It plays to our worst instincts and our worst elements. It’s controlled by invisible bodies, firms like KPMG or McKinsey, who do things from the shadows and that we will mostly never know about. It’s controlled by politicians and their staff, some of whom are committed to average people but who are unwittingly used by a system that oppresses through a million creative permutations. Some of whom get off on inflicting pain. Some of whom are the laziest, most boring, least talented shit leopards you’ve ever met

And the stories are told by a journalism establishment that is either dying by a million cuts or dying by self-immolation. Dying all the same.

That’s why the news that Canada has surpasssed, at least, 50,000 COVID-19 deaths (50,327 as of right this moment), is simply not news. News is what is happening. These deaths have happened already. Or really, they have never happened at all, because there was no pandemic.

And what’s the saying? One death is a tragedy, 50,000 is a statistic (specifically, how much this will save Canada in Old Age Security payments).

* yes, I know very well that the official number of deaths is articifically low due to inconsistent reporting from region to region. I was co-author on this report into excess deaths in the first year of the pandemic: https://rsc-src.ca/en/covid-19-policy-briefing/excess-all-cause-mortality-during-covid-19-epidemic-in-canada