In the first century A.D., a mysterious sickness descended on the Greek city of Ephesus in modern-day Turkey. Though the affliction was contagious, it affected only the residents of the city and did not spread to neighboring populations. After numerous unsuccessful attempts to expel the plague, the Ephesians appealed for help from Apollonius of Tyana, a charismatic pagan philosopher and wonderworker. Apollonius assembled the Ephesian citizens and declared that he would put an immediate stop to the disease.
He led the entire population to a theater, where they found an old mendicant dressed in rags. Arranging the Ephesian citizens in a circle around the beggar, Apollonius commanded them to “pick up as many stones as you can and hurl them at this enemy of the gods.” The Ephesians were rightfully horrified:
Now, the Ephesians wondered what he meant and were shocked at the idea of murdering a stranger so manifestly miserable; for he was begging and praying them to take mercy upon him. Nevertheless, Apollonius insisted and egged on the Ephesians … And as soon as some of them began to take shots and hit him with their stones, the beggar, who had seemed to blink and be blind, gave them all a sudden glance, and his eyes were full of fire. Then the Ephesians recognized that he was a demon, and they stoned him so thoroughly that their stones were heaped into a great cairn around him.
Following the collective killing of the beggar, the plague lifted, and the city was healed. The horrifying account quoted above was provided by Apollonius’s biographer, Philostratus, who wrote of it approvingly as a kind of miracle. The story confounded historians and scholars of later centuries. How could a stoning cure a plague?
Political theorist Rene Girard offers an explanation for what he termed the “horrible miracle of Apollonius of Tyana.” Girard observed that in the ancient and medieval world, “the word ‘plague’ was often used in a sense that is not strictly medical. Almost always there was a social dimension.” The sickness that raged through Ephesus and yet failed to spread to surrounding communities may be interpreted as principally a social or spiritual affliction. It could therefore be “healed” through the application of a social, rather than medical, technology. Girard named this the scapegoating mechanism.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seemed determined to work his own horrible miracle when he called a snap federal election last August. His campaign platform was defined almost entirely by a single promise: Trudeau vowed that he would defeat COVID-19. He would do it by putting the screws to unvaccinated Canadians. If reelected, Trudeau would bar unvaccinated people from boarding trains or planes. He would make vaccination mandatory for hundreds of thousands of federal civil servants, amend anti-discrimination laws so that unvaccinated people could be fired from their jobs without recourse, and provide $1 billion to support the creation of digital passport systems that would effectively bar the unvaccinated from participating in the social lives of their communities.
Prior to the election, Canada had mostly avoided the overt politicization of SARS-CoV-2. There were varying levels of support for lockdown policies, but whatever one’s views, vaccines were understood to be the way out. While effective at reducing the severity of illness, the COVID-19 vaccines proved leakier than expected in terms of sterilizing immunity — and with a shorter window of effectiveness. Canada’s high rate of vaccine uptake was not enough to defeat COVID-19, but it did turn the unvaccinated population into an outgroup that could be blamed for the ways in which the public health interventions failed to fulfill the promises made by the people who imposed them.
Throughout his reelection campaign, Trudeau spoke of unvaccinated people as if they were a source of both moral and microbial contamination. “Those people are putting us all at risk,”
said Trudeau
at a campaign stop, referring to a crowd of anti-mandate protesters. “They are putting at risk our kids.” Later, during a talk show appearance in Quebec, he opined that those who refuse to be vaccinated are people “who don’t believe in science, who are often misogynistic, often racist.” In other words, enemies of the new gods. “They’re a small group, but they take up space. So, as a leader, as a country, we need to make a choice: Do we tolerate these people?”
Responding to criticism that his proposed measures bordered on the tyrannical, Trudeau offered a mocking reply: “Well, the answer to tyranny is to have an election.” By share of the popular vote, the Liberal Party finished second, securing the support of just over 20% of eligible voters. It was enough to win another minority government. Soon after, every Canadian province implemented QR code-based vaccine passports. Tens of thousands of people lost work for declining the vaccines. Millions were barred from traveling by train or plane, eating in restaurants, going to the gym, attending cultural events, watching their children’s hockey games, or gathering inside their own homes.
The stigmatization was egged on by some of the country’s leading media institutions. In the editorial pages of Canada’s largest print newspapers, unvaccinated people became “unvaccinated creatures.” They were “anti-social moaners” and members of a “death cult.” Unvaccinated healthcare workers, who were previously celebrated for their heroics on the front lines of the pandemic, were now a “whiny minority of self-centered, ill-informed workers,” according to a Globe and Mail columnist. At the Toronto Star, a columnist chastised a provincial premier for not doing enough to “punish the unvaccinated, the dim, the cruel, the easily led, the mean-eyed people who cherish the freedom to harm others.” On a Quebec television program, a young child was cheered for saying she would call the police if she came across an unvaccinated person.
And then omicron arrived. In just 40 days, more Canadians tested positive for COVID-19 than in the entire first year of the pandemic despite 80% of the population being fully vaccinated. By the end of 2021, the reported case rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated Canadians were indistinguishable. To the extent that vaccine mandates were ever intended to slow or stop transmission of COVID-19, the rationale had collapsed. And that is when the government of Justin Trudeau chose to impose a new vaccine mandate on cross-border truckers.
The “miracle” of scapegoating is that it reestablishes cohesion and unity where the social order has been radically disrupted. By identifying a scapegoat, the rest of the community is given a target for what would otherwise be free-floating anger and anxiety. But in order to succeed in restoring social communion, an important condition needs to be met: There has to be consensus about the identity and guilt of the scapegoat. In the story of Apollonius of Tyana, the mendicant selected for stoning was initially described as “blinking artfully as if blind.” To the assembled Ephesians, he appeared helpless, wretched, and deserving of sympathy rather than violence, hence their initial reluctance to set upon him. But once the first several stones had been cast, the beggar’s eyes flashed with fire. It was only after the man turned the crowd’s hatred back on to them that they felt justified in their horrific deed. The beggar had to reveal himself as a demon so that the guilt of the Ephesians could be assuaged and true consensus achieved.
This may explain a curious feature of Canadian COVID-19 politics: that the drive to punish unvaccinated people seemed to grow more urgent just as the public health rationale for vaccine mandates grew weaker. As the omicron wave peaked, there came a growing acceptance that the virus was headed for endemicity. We would all be exposed, vaccinated or not, but it would be manageable. The scapegoating ritual was not complete — the unvaccinated had not yet been thoroughly defeated — but many in the assembled crowd were starting to lose interest in throwing stones. The narrative of the guilt of the unvaccinated was collapsing.
For those who had staked their reputations and political careers on the success of the ritual, this was an unacceptable turn. The consensus had to be saved. Following the announcement of a new vaccine and quarantine requirement for cross-border truckers, the “Freedom Convoy” began making its way to the Canadian capital to call for an end to vaccine mandates, passports, and lockdowns. Even before they arrived in Ottawa and set up encampments outside of Parliament, large segments of the national media depicted the protesters as extremists and purveyors of dangerous misinformation. Trudeau said he had no plans to meet with the convoy, dismissing them as a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views.”
Some protesters, to be sure, appeared to hold views that fall well outside the spectrum of mainstream political opinion. They also undoubtedly broke the law: obstructing critical infrastructure, temporarily blockading border crossings, occupying multiple city blocks in downtown Ottawa for weeks, and, until a court order stopped them, tormenting local residents with ear-shattering horns. But none of this justified the way the protesters were depicted by influential Canadian media organizations and public figures, who seemed at times to be in the grips of full-blown moral panic, as if Canadian democracy was about to be overthrown by a group of neo-Nazi terrorists and insurrectionists. The convoy protesters were accused of being racists and white supremacists, despite the racial and ethnic diversity of the crowd. They were chastised for defacing a monument because someone had placed a “mandate freedom” placard in the arms of a statue and draped it with a Canadian flag. Several national news outlets ran news stories speculating that the protesters were behind an alleged mass murder arson attempt despite the city’s police department saying there was no evidence to support the theory. They were accused of waving “many” Confederate flags (one masked man showed up with one and was promptly made to leave). Political operatives, and later a Liberal member of Parliament, asserted that “Honk honk” was code for “Heil Hitler.”
In reality, the occupying convoy had shown considerable discipline: They did not loot stores, topple statues, attack people with axes, or burn down buildings, as left-wing protesters in Canada have done in the past year alone. Instead, they built things: pop-up eateries, an outdoor gym, a sound stage. There was a hot tub, a bouncy castle, and a Sikh kitchen. Each morning, evangelicals led a prayer march. In the evenings, the protesters danced to ’80s ballads and waved Canadian flags on hockey sticks. Between banners emblazoned with “F*** Trudeau” were messages of supplication: “God Forgive Trudeau.” Across the country, the only notable instances of violence were committed against the protesters. When the police finally arrived to clear the crowd, they were met with chants of “We love you.”
In the end, the scapegoating ritual will remain incomplete, and the consensus about the guilt of the unvaccinated will never crystallize. Since the convoy protests began, several Canadian provinces have dropped their digital passport regimes. A majority of Canadians say they disapprove of the Freedom Convoy’s occupation of Ottawa, but a majority also now want COVID-19 restrictions lifted. Canada will discover what happens when the scapegoating ritual fails: There is no “miracle,” no restored sense of order or communion. It’s just a sordid stoning of a wretched beggar — and a country left more divided than ever.
Caylan Ford is a documentary filmmaker and former foreign policy adviser to Global Affairs Canada. She lives in Calgary.
