I walked toward the Superstore entrance to pick up a couple of bottles of sparkling grape juice for our Canadian Thanksgiving Dinner with our son and his wife. It was a clear, crisp, Sunday morning, the kind of morning when I should be in church, but that has rather gone by the wayside with COVID-19. I noticed a woman sitting on the concrete, in a slightly recessed corner. leaning against a concrete wall, wrapped in a blanket. Nearby was a loaded shopping cart with an over-sized beige dimple foam on top of luggage and other things. She looked like she was crying and I stopped to talk to her.

She really was crying as she told me she was wet and cold and miserable. She coughed and her nose was running. Her eyes were bleary. Drugs, yes.

I chatted with her, trying to understand her situation and then suggested we meet at Burger King where I called every resource I could think of to find a shelter for her. I wish I could say I found a place that would take her. One place asked if she was of aboriginal descent. No. Did that make a difference? Would they turn away a woman based on her skin color?

Her name was Amanda. She had been homeless since Spring. She told me about the jobs she’d had and about her husband who was also homeless. They were sleeping in a tent and she hadn’t seen him for a day and was worried. Her two children were staying with a relative.

When she started rolling a joint in the restaurant and began to look restless I told her I needed to go. At home I finally got through to the one shelter that had given us some hope by asking us to call back, and call back again in an hour–and then call in another hour. I hurried out to find Amanda, but she was gone. I texted her but there was no response. She was able to find her phone cord and charge her phone at the Burger King when we were together. That had lifted her spirits a little. She had no phone plan, so could only call when she was able to get connected to wifi.

It’s been exceptionally cold on the coast this past week, and I’ve wondered about people like Amanda who can freeze outside. There are emergency shelters open, but not everyone is comfortable using them. The other night our building’s fire alarm went off. I didn’t want to go out in the freezing cold, even for a few minutes till the fire brigade arrived. It turned out that a side door was ajar and there was evidence of someone lighting a fire to do drugs. They must have left in a hurry when the alarm went off.

I’m thinking about this as I read the December 31 National Post headline, Unvaccinated workers who lose jobs ineligible for EI benefits, minister says.

Employment and Social Development Canada has issued a notice to employers enforcing vaccine mandates to help them fill out records of employment, a document needed to apply for EI benefits.

The department said if an employee doesn’t report to work or is suspended or terminated for refusing to comply with a vaccine mandate, then the employer should indicate that they quit, took a leave of absence or were dismissed-potentially disqualifying them from collecting EI.

National Post

As I read this I see something that is preventable. We can prevent more people from becoming homeless.

We can prevent it by not firing them, dismissing them, and refusing their final lifeline of support–Unemployment Insurance.

Our bureaucrats are creating issues. They don’t appear to care if more people end up on the streets. They don’t seem to notice that their policies are causing a crisis in our health care, as the staffing shortage they have created causes more burn-out of over-worked medical workers. We don’t know how desperate things will need to get for them to relinquish their obsession with data and begin to take a sensible and human approach. Does the health system have to collapse entirely? They can’t blame it on the unvaccinated. They can blame it on their obsession with meeting a vaccine quota. Where did the promise go of needing only 80 per cent of the population, or whatever it was, to be vaccinated? We are long past that.

I am fully vaccinated and I have vaccine regret. Since getting the vaccine my health has deteriorated to a frightful state. I’ve had heart problems, breathing problems, neurological problems with my arms and legs, constant UTI’s, vaginal bleeding, discolouration of my skin going from purple to white. And it’s getting worse by the month. Now I supposedly have fibromyalgia….inflammation in my arms is going into my hands. My husband has developed melanoma–skin cancer–since his vaccine, on the arm where he was vaccinated, but he is refusing to look at the possibility that the two may be related.

I’ve done a little research, as we do when we have health problems. It seems the spike protein is the culprit, causing inflammation. It’s not disappearing as fast as it was supposed to and it is going places it was not meant to go. Two medical professionals have, off the record, I’m sure, said to me that they are seeing a lot of this…symptoms I’ve described. So don’t be so hard on people who don’t want to get the vaccine.

All that accompanies vaccination is preventable if we allow people to choose. It’s time to realize we cannot escape the virus in its various forms but we still have a choice around vaccine injury. Or some of us do. I would like to be numbered among those who give others the option to choose, especially now that it is so apparent that the vaccinated can spread the virus too.

We are not going to vaccinate ourselves out of this.

While the Omicron variant rages–and it’s really no worse than the common cold–we are encouraged to get our 4^th booster shot. Due to the stress of so many vaccinated people now getting sick, the isolation period has been reduced to five days. All of this is beginning to look rather random.

Fully vaccinated people are getting sick of the virus in droves. Can somebody define insanity for me, please? A few people are waking up and putting two and two together, namely, we are not going to vaccinate ourselves out of this. So stop the mandates. Mandates are evidence of the type of systemic oppression which disregards the possibility that people can think for themselves. It disregards the possibility that people need to be given the option to choose an outcome that differs from what those in authority want for them. Mandates are causing untold suffering for our country.

Let our New Year’s resolution be this: We will be there for one another as fellow members of society in the finest sense of the word.

Göran Persson, Prime Minster of Sweden

A friend posted this quote on Facebook: Let our New Year’s resolution be this: We will be there for one another as fellow members of society in the finest sense of the word.

Lest we forget, the healthcare workers who were dismissed for not getting the vaccine were also the ones who put their lives at risk throughout the pandemic when there was little to no protection for them. Regardless of their views around the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine, they deserve our compassion and support. It is unthinkably cruel that our government leaders, along with our top health leaders, have turned on them.

And if we are all honest, the vaccine is not that safe or effective. As this CTV News article, published on December 31, states, there are “520 long term care staff with the virus” in Ontario. And as we know, they are all vaccinated. And they are all infecting others.

So the rationale in keeping the unvaccinated out of the workforce is falling apart completely. Never mind the punitive action taken by our government to refuse EI to those who were fired.

I repeat: The vaccinated are spreading the virus. Vaccine mandates and firings and refusal of EI should all stop, immediately. Let’s stop this tunnel vision and turn this world back to a time when we appreciated the contributions of our helpers. By this time we have enough evidence of the destructiveness of these mandates to our relationships, our livelihoods and our communities.