Friday May 22, 2020 ~ BC
by John Twigg | Special to West Shore Voice News
It is hoped in BC that this province will get through the COVID-19 pandemic better than most other jurisdictions. But the reality is that the world around BC will never be the same.
About 400 million people are falling into extreme poverty and acute hunger (according to a UN estimate), a new age of internet censorship is rising, and the many stresses caused by COVID-19 are producing mental health issues for some people.
The many gross dysfunctions in the United States and the European Union politics and the corruption in communist dictatorships are only making such things worse — such as causing the cancellation of what would have been a pivotal G-7 Summit at Camp David in early June.
Stresses of COVID lockdown leading to domestic violence:
Some proof that the socioeconomic circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic are making people become emotionally unstable is evident right here on Vancouver Island, where an outbreak of domestic violence has filled all of the shelters for battered women, as well as in Vancouver where people of colour were being attacked in the street and on buses.
Was Nova Scotia mass murderer triggered by COVID lockdown?
And now there is evidence that Gabriel Wortman, the Nova Scotia denturist who shot and killed 22 people on April 18 and 19, may have been pushed over his mental edge by the social lockdowns that followed the COVID-19 outbreak, even though he had evidently been planning the attack for a while.
While news reports from the outset have focussed on Wortman’s misogyny and history of abusing women around him and his fondness for guns, it now has come out from a court document made public Tuesday in Halifax that Wortman also was fixated on the COVID shutdown of civil liberties which included stopping the practise of his dentistry.
The information released by police and Wortman’s associates show he had a history of strange behaviours going back 10 years including amassing a large collection of guns, making a mimic police car and RCMP uniform and buying $800 worth of gasoline he used to burn down several of the buildings he owned. While he had been abusive towards numerous people over a period of 10 or more years, he didn’t start killing people until the COVID lockdowns happened, with a former colleague reportedly telling police he had become “paranoid” about it and had had a mental breakdown.
Another clue that Wortman was fixated on the COVID crisis was in an email he sent on April 14 which mentioned he was spending his mornings “studying the news on U-tube” — which further suggests his concern was the loss of his civil liberties moreso than say the death toll the disease was wreaking.
==== About the writer:
John Twigg is an independent journalist based in Campbell River, BC who has covered BC politics since the mid-1980s.