(The Political Scientist) Ontario’s premier Doug Ford announced the strictest lockdown measures yet with his bold announcement on Monday that the entire province of 14 million plus residents would go into lockdown beginning Boxing Day. This is an attempt to mitigate the expected surge in cases following the Christmas holiday season. In justifying the decision, Ford argued that he would not want to see the deaths and increase in cases witnessed in other jurisdictions in Ontario.

He stated that Ontario has the lowest death rate among all jurisdictions and his latest measure was designed to ensure that the government has control on the pandemic. While the entire province is going into lockdown, Ford indicated that the southern regions of the province would go into a 28-day lockdown and the northern regions will be going into 14-day lockdown.

“This difficult action is, without a doubt, necessary to save  lives and prevent our hospitals from being overwhelmed in the coming weeks. Make no mistake, thousands of lives are at stake right now. If we fail to take action now, the consequences could be catastrophic,” The visibly concerned premier stated.

He continued, “The risk of interprovincial travel and further spread is a real concern. We’ve seen that people are moving from region to region, and bringing COVID with them. The health officials are telling us that province-wide action is needed if we’re going to break these trends.”

Ontario has seen rising cases since students returned to the classroom in September. The premier noted that elective surgeries would be put on hold to accommodate the expected surge in infections that would lead to ICU hospitalization. Ontario has 161,000 total cases with 4,181 total deaths, second only to Quebec which has 179,000 cases with 7,166 deaths.