Letter to Canmore Mayor, Aug 2020

Dear Mayor Borrowman:

I’m writing to request that mask wearing be a person’s choice in Canmore. We live right on Main Street by the sidewalk, and the idea of being required to wear a mask to take out the garbage, for example, seems like an encroachment on a basic human freedom.

Additionally, I’ve had trouble breathing for quite a while after wearing masks before, and I feel that mask-wearing is detrimental to my immune and respiratory systems.

I worry this mask business will drag on for months and months and affect my children psychologically (it’s fearmongering, affects their ability to recognize speech as some of them are still very young, affects ability to recognize people they know, and the virus doesn’t affect children anyway!)

I personally believe the psychological effects of the distancing, the lockdown, and the masking are worse than the virus itself. Suicide rates shot up to levels that hadn’t been seen since the Great Depression. We need to live our lives.

We all get colds and flus every year. This is a flu, with an extremely low death rate. I will gladly wear a mask in nursing homes or hospitals around vulnerable populations, but it destroys quality of life when a person can’t breathe when they’re trying to get groceries for their family or take their kids on an outing. If someone was truly worried about the virus, they’d stay home. Those who are out and about, for instance downtown Canmore and in recreation centers, are the people yearning for freedom and normalcy.

The whole point of locking down, originally, was stated to avoid overloading the hospitals. The hospitals have been nowhere near overloaded. Herd immunity would be achieved much more quickly by living freely, and this whole thing could be put behind us.

If you do enact a mandatory masking By-law, please include therein when it would be repealed (ie when local cases drop below a certain number).

Please don’t succumb to the political pressure to follow suit in removing people’s ability to choose.