Enough talk; time to act

To state the obvious right off the top: international travel isn’t the biggest concern we should have right now about COVID-19. Far from it.

The biggest worry is the rocky rollout of vaccines. The delay in delivery from Pfizer (no new doses this week, fewer than originally expected for a few weeks after that) is a real setback.

Canada is falling further behind other countries in the number of shots administered per capita. That’s a big problem for the Trudeau government and — much more importantly — it’s a real problem for the battle to bring the COVID virus under control.

But the impact of cases coming in through our airports and over the land border with the United States isn’t nothing. Especially now that public health authorities are sounding the alarm over the virulent new strains of COVID-19 originating in Britain, South Africa and Brazil — and potentially elsewhere.

More to the point, clamping down on travel is something governments can do now. In fact, it’s something they should have done long ago.

With vital vaccine deliveries, governments are largely powerless. Premier Doug Ford can talk tough all he likes about “getting up the ying-yang” of the Pfizer CEO over delays in vaccine deliveries. And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can make a show of calling up the heads of Pfizer and Moderna and insisting that Canada gets its fair share.

But ultimately that’s out of Canada’s control. With no domestic production, we have to trust that Big Pharma will honour their contracts and deliver the doses they’ve promised. But the whole world is clamouring for vaccines, and we’re stuck in the queue.

Hence the temptation for government to change the channel and talk about travel restrictions. It may be a day (months, really) and a dollar short, but the prime minister should follow through on his promise to bring in tougher rules on international travel. He’s been telling Canadians for days now not to travel for “non-essential” reasons, and to cancel any plans they have, and now’s the time to act.

We suspect the reasons for the delay in acting on Trudeau’s talk are two-fold. One is to give people a chance to change their plans and to get home if they’re abroad. The second is disagreement on exactly what to do.

A ban on travel would violate some basic constitutional rights; Canadians do, in fact, have a right to leave and enter their own country without asking permission from their rulers. Ottawa would probably have to invoke the Emergencies Act to enforce such a step, and the prime minister has ruled that out in the past.

A more logical move would be to accomplish the same goal by making quarantine requirements much stricter. Right now arriving travellers must self-isolate for 14 days, usually in their own homes, and public health authorities check up on them with a few phone calls.

It appears the government is considering moving to something like the Australian system: forcing travellers to isolate for two weeks in hotels at their own expense (in the range of $3,000). No one would go through that unless they absolutely had to, so it would be the closest thing to a travel ban without the legal complications.

Given the restrictions the rest of us are putting up with to fight the pandemic, we would support such a step for anyone foolish enough to venture abroad without a very good (“essential”) reason.

A bigger issue is the tens of thousands of truckers and other workers crossing the U.S. border every day to keep trade going. The government must also find a way to reduce risk there dramatically, perhaps by using rapid tests to screen workers every few days.

It’s possible that provincial leaders (such as Ford and Quebec’s François Legault) are making more than they should of the threat from travel to distract from their own governments’ shortcomings. That’s politics.

But their antics don’t mean the issue isn’t real. This is squarely in Ottawa’s wheelhouse, and it should act without delay.

Clamping down on travel is something governments should have done long ago