National Post (National Edition)
The Conservative Party of Canada shouldn't want to be known as the party with the hair trigger.
— CHRIS SELLEY,
Monday-morning quarterback is not a widely admired position. But every morning is Monday morning nowadays — especially in parts of Ontario and Quebec, where folks are watching through their fingers as daily COVID-19 case counts rise, testing capacity struggles in vain to keep up with entirely predictable back-to-school demand, and the generally accepted safety of outdoor socializing is soon to vanish into howling winter. Many Canadians continue to see other places doing far, far better than their places are: on case counts, on death counts and, perhaps most infuriatingly, on testing.
On testing alone, the federal government should be fighting for its life: Jurisdictions all over the world — including the one immediately to our south, to which many Canadians so enjoy comparing themselves favourably — are rolling out rapid saliva-based tests en masse while Health Canada refuses even to approve them. The people running that department appear to be deranged, if not actively hostile toward the public's health. It is unfathomable that Patty Hajdu is still health minister.
And even with no end in sight to the current nightmare, we all know it will be Sunday afternoon again some time relatively soon: Reports will arrive of some new bug gathering steam abroad — perhaps in China again, perhaps somewhere else — and we will need to respond. We will need a much better quarterback. I am all for holding open tryouts, including on Monday mornings.
But it has been quite frustrating, in this regard, to see the federal Conservatives, notably finance critic Pierre Poilievre, harping on the issue of border closures. “The reason we needed to spend so much to rescue the incomes of Canadians and their businesses is because the Liberals ignored military intelligence and let thousands of people come here from China after we knew there was a pandemic there, including 2,000 people from the most infected region of China,” Poilievre told the Calgary Herald last week.
It is an entirely defensible argument that Canada should have closed the border to Chinese nationals earlier than it did. Few countries waited longer. And while non-partisan followers of Canadian politics should be prepared at all times for crushing disappointment, it is reasonable to hope an Erin O'Toole government might abandon the Justin Trudeau government's bewildering obeisance to Beijing.
But the evidence we have says China wasn't the big problem on that proverbial Sunday afternoon: The National Post reported in midApril that China was a minor source of COVID-infected travellers arriving in Canada. According to government data from Ontario and Quebec, the two hardest-hit provinces, the United States was by far the largest source: 404 of 1,201 travel-related cases in Ontario, 373 of 1,032 in Quebec, versus five and zero cases linked to China, respectively.
That's hardly surprising: American borders are as open as ours to trade, commerce and tourism, and there are 10 times more people there than here.
The idea that a Conservative government would close Canada to foreign nationals at a time when it might make a difference — in the case of COVID-19, that would have been this past February, or January, or even December, as Poilievre suggested in a recent tweet — is not especially plausible. The idea that any Canadian government would have supported closing the Canada-U.S. border at such a time is laughable.
Looking forward, rather than backward, it's not even desirable: An export economy of 37 million people can't be shutting down its borders every time the World Health Organization flags a potential threat. (It flags a lot of threats.) And the Conservative Party of Canada shouldn't want to be known as the party with the hair trigger. We have more than enough politicians demanding the entire country be shut down.
This plague, the worst North America has seen in 100 years, is demonstrably manageable without shutting down borders at the drop of a hat.
Countries all over the world are doing it better than Ontario and Quebec are — including within the European Union, where movement is much freer than between Canada and the United States. There are so very many bad calls to criticize 100-per-cent fairly in hindsight. Many are within provincial jurisdiction — thank goodness, for the provinces that got it right — but many are not, including Health Canada's testing insanity.
One of the very few professional casualties of Canada's middling-to-God-awful anti-pandemic efforts is Tina Namiesniowski, who resigned as president of the Public Health Agency of Canada on Friday. She didn't cite specifically the agency's ramping down of its pandemic surveillance and risk-assessment system — which was assessing COVID-19 as “low risk” as late as March — and the redeployment of those resources, in part, to study the almost non-existent public health risk posed by vaping. Hajdu has disavowed any knowledge of that decision, as if that somehow lets her off the hook.
That alone is a far more compelling avenue of criticism than anything to do with Canada's borders.