It's only Day 3 and it's a debacle

Somehow I initially doubted reports that a few people arriving on international flights at Toronto's Pearson Airport were just sashaying out to the Uber pickup area, having been issued fines, sooner than submitting to a “mandatory” swabup-the-nose and three quite expensive nights of “mandatory” hotel accommodations pending the results.

Perhaps I was remembering the deeply unfriendly official reception on offer at Pearson when I arrived back in Canada two weeks ago. It did not seem like mutiny would be tolerated, not that I thought to attempt it. Or perhaps, having been born and raised among the Laurentian Elites, I had some forgotten vestigial faith in the most basic competencies of government, and the dramatically stricter test-and-hotel requirements that kicked in Monday mistakenly activated it.

I won't make that mistake again. It's all true. “Unless there are some serious or aggravating circumstances, where the public safety is at risk, we are not … detaining individuals who are not complying with the regulations under the Quarantine Act,” Peel Regional Police spokesperson Constable Akhil Mooken told the National Post.

The whole dubious premise of the new rules is, of course, that every single international traveller is a “public safety risk.”

Indeed, it's days like Wednesday that make me wonder how Canadians maintain any trust in governments at all, never mind support for their demonstrably lacklustre anti-pandemic efforts. Even with Canada falling further and further behind the leaders in the vaccine race, Léger's latest poll for the Association for Canadian Studies found 56 per cent of us were satisfied with the federal government's efforts — just nine points fewer than on March 23, when all of 24 Canadians had died from COVID-19.

but then, Tuesday was such a day as well. Tuesday was the day it somehow became controversial that Ontario's 34 public health units would have to “design (and) carry out their own COVId-19 vaccination plan,” as a CP24 headline put it.

“Ontario government to have 34 different COVId-19 vaccination plans,” was CTV's snarky headline.

It was very odd. Why would anyone even in downtown Toronto want Queen's Park micromanaging the injection of vaccines into arms, as opposed to their local health department — never mind someone in ear Falls, Wawa or Chalk river?

If they weren't inherently obvious, the problems with top-down, one-size-fits-all approaches have been ably demonstrated south of the border. California and New york State were forced to soften eligibility criteria to ensure that doses weren't wasted for lack of qualified recipients — which is an absolutely insane outcome. Surely New york City Mayor bill de blasio was better suited to decide and answer for whether police and correctional officers deserved priority access (he said yes) than Governor Andrew Cuomo (he said no).

If anything, Queen's Park is setting too many top-down rules along these lines. It certainly isn't setting too few. how you deliver vaccines matters; delivering them, period, matters a lot more.

This passion for central planning seems to be most prevalent among the urban Ontarian chattering classes, which are heavily represented in the national media. It has been evident in the various calls over the course of the pandemic for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to invoke the emergencies Act and implement uniform restrictions across the country, or “national standards” for long-term care homes.

When did “uniform” and “national” become synonyms for “better”? No one in New brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince edward Island, Newfoundland or british Columbia would be remotely interested in a federal takeover of their better-than-averageto-superb efforts at keeping COVId at bay, both in general and in long-term care homes.

“If the Prime Minister did implement a national strategy,” Scott Gilmore wrote recently in Maclean's, “he could then hire some of the million Canadians currently unemployed, and finally launch an effective test and trace program country-wide.”

huh? Why would the federal government, which is not in the business of healthcare delivery, fare any better than the provinces, which are in the business of healthcare delivery? The federal government can't even make sure people get from an airport to an airport hotel.

To that point, Wednesday was not a good day at all for the feds' new crackdown on foreign travellers. halton Police announced they had charged a private security guard, hired as part of a beefed-up quarantine enforcement effort, with trying to extract a cash fine from a woman for a supposed violation, then sexually assaulting her when she refused. And La Presse reported the case of a 24-year-old woman allegedly whisked away involuntarily from Montreal airport to a federal quarantine hotel. Twenty-nine-yearold robert Shakory, a fellow “guest,” now stands charged with sexually assaulting her.

Just a few weeks ago, Canada's chattering classes were more or less united with Trudeau's government in believing that even testing arriving passengers, never mind locking them up, was pointless. Then, suddenly, the same chattering classes demanded a crackdown on foreign travel. At this rate, before long, they might double back and conclude that crackdown was considerably worse than pointless.

by rights, the feds would look terrible as a result. but Canadians' faith in government — even mine — dies very, very hard.