Airport chaos does little to inspire trust

In times of crisis in Canada, there are always pundits and commentators available to tell us how well our governments are faring, and how silly it would be to doubt them. All those anti-crisis measures other countries are pursuing, but we aren’t? They are overreacting. And when we wind up pursuing those same measures a few days later, and it’s very difficult to understand why it wouldn’t have been better to pursue them earlier? Ah, well, this is what the experts have advised. We are taking things “step by step,” as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Monday. Canadians do not take more than one step at once. That is for the hotter-blooded nations.

It feels like tempting fate. Canadians aren’t badly governed in any relative sense. But consider all the things Canadian governments are capable of screwing to death: buying military equipment, rolling out a public transit smart card, creating a database of rifles and their owners, paying their employees. At the moment we’re meant to trust them with advanced epidemiology — and as we saw Sunday, they can’t even run an airport properly.

On Monday, Public Safety Minister Bill Blair insisted that Canada’s airports, which are under federal jurisdiction, were ready to communicate to all passengers arriving from abroad that they must self-quarantine for two weeks as soon as that became federal policy — which was on Sunday.

This may be true. But federal advice to get our rear ends home predated that, as did recommendations from various other Canadian jurisdictions — from the province of Alberta to the City of Toronto — to self-quarantine for 14 days upon return. So folks were understandably perturbed to find that upon arrival at Toronto Pearson in particular — the second-busiest international airport on the continent — they were met with glacial, cheek-by-jowl lineups at customs and no up-todate guidance on self-quarantine.

There’s nothing wrong with different Canadian jurisdictions giving different advice and orders at different times. Canada contains multitudes, and the world many more. Touching down on Canadian soil from Bermuda, with zero coronavirus cases, is a lot different than touching down from Milan. Going home to your cabin or ranch is a lot different than going home to your shoebox condominium.

But federal jurisdiction is no excuse for airports not to be delivering provincial and local advice. That’s a very basic planning failure, and should easily have been fixable on the fly. There is no excuse whatsoever, meanwhile, for Canada Border Services Agency to have been operating at anything other than above-maximum staffing.

The Trudeau government’s credibility on this file bottomed out Sunday night with a shambolic press scrum on Parliament Hill that saw the wrong ministers — among them David Lametti (Justice) and Mélanie Joly (Economic Development and Official Languages) — trying to answer for these failings. They didn’t half-manage it. All they managed was to promise reporters some kind of very significant announcement the next day, which is the sort of thing that might send a population more used to crises into genuine panic.

Things had vastly improved by Monday afternoon, when the right ministers — among them Blair, Patty Hajdu (Health), Marc Garneau (Transport) and Chrystia Freeland (Intergovernmental Affairs, Deputy PM, chair of the special COVID-19 Cabinet committee) — put on a reasonably professional performance explaining and defending that significant announcement: most notably, closing Canadian borders to foreigners.

That performance had two very serious flaws, however. One is that Hajdu had last been seen Friday dismissing the notion of closing borders. “Canadians think that we can stop this at the border, but what we see is a global pandemic meaning that border measures are actually highly ineffective and in some cases can create harm,” she said. That opinion is widely held among experts in various fields, to whom we are assured the government has always been and is still in thrall. It is unclear what we should make of this about-face. If this is a good idea now, it’s impossible to think it wasn’t one last week.

Nor could any of the ministers explain why Americans would be exempt from the new ban on foreigners.

FEDERAL JURISDICTION IS NO EXCUSE FOR AIRPORTS NOT TO BE DELIVERING

ADVICE.

Our countries’ economies are intricately intertwined, they stressed — which is true. But they noted specific exemptions from the 14-day self-quarantine rules for economically necessary people like truck drivers and flight and train crews. That only further raises the question: Why not ban everyone else?

All other Americans are subject to the self-quarantine rules, Freeland stressed, so tourists wouldn’t likely want to come in the first place. Also true. By the time this column lands on newsstands there might not be a movie, play, gallery, museum, zoo, restaurant, bar, boutique, farmer’s market or roadside attraction left open in this country. But that goes equally for residents of every other country in the world — and we’ve banned them anyway.

On Monday morning, the Trudeau government’s credibility was barely hanging on to the edge of a precipice by its fingernails; by end of day, it was back on top, gasping for breath. Good luck to us all.