Canada visit reveals extent of U.S. coronavirus failures

For two weeks, we waited for the pandemic police to come.

In mid-July, my wife and I headed on vacation to a rustic cabin her father built 65 years ago on a small lake north of Toronto.

Most Americans can’t visit Canada these days. Because of the coronavirus threat, both countries have closed their borders to nonessential traffic.

But my spouse is a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen, so we were allowed in — as long as we agreed to quarantine ourselves for 14 days.

Not a symbolic, wear-amask-and-keep-your-distance-but-go-about-yourbusiness quarantine; a real one — no venturing beyond the cabin and the dock. No shopping trips, no long walks, no visitors.

And no swimming in the lake — a question I rashly asked one of the public health officers who telephoned almost every day to check on us.

“I’m sorry, but no,” he said. “It’s a public lake. You might run into someone out there. And if you got into trouble, someone would have to fish you out.”

“I’m really sorry,” he added. He sounded like he meant it.

But he also reminded me that the Ontario Provincial Police could show up at any time to make sure we weren’t breaking the rules — and that we could be fined the equivalent of U.S. $206 to $1,125.

He wasn’t kidding. In June, two Ontario men who violated quarantine after a visit to Minnesota were each fined about U.S. $850. Seven Americans who took an unauthorized hike in Banff National Park were each fined about U.S. $900.

It’s one reason Canada is doing so much better in this pandemic than we are: Unlike Americans, they set tough rules — and mostly obey them.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set guidelines to help governors decide when it was safe to reopen their states for business. But President Trump urged governors to ignore those rules, and many did — producing COVID-19 outbreaks across more than half the country.

That didn’t happen in Canada. Just as in the United States, most decision-making on health is at the level of provinces, not the federal government led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But Trudeau urged caution, not recklessness, and provincial leaders followed suit — even those from the opposition Conservative Party.

The result: The United States has suffered almost twice as many COVID-19 deaths as Canada on a per capita basis.

Canada’s response to the crisis hasn’t been perfect. Its two biggest provinces, Quebec and Ontario, saw severe outbreaks in April and May. A wave of infections swept through nursing homes, claiming some 7,000 dead, about 80% of the country’s total.

Quebec, which allowed bars to reopen in June, may have acted a little early; the province suffered a minioutbreak in July.

But elsewhere, reopening has been more deliberate. Toronto, the country’s largest city, allowed bars and restaurants to resume indoor service — with lots of spacing — only last week.

As a result, the epidemic’s spread has slowed. Canada reported 3,043 new cases last week; California, whose population is only slightly larger, reported more than 55,000.

It’s hard to avoid giving some credit to the notion of national character: Canadians — unlike Americans — pride themselves on being a nation that generally follows the rules.

Mask-wearing appears almost universal in cities and small towns. And businesses are diligent about requiring patrons to sanitize their hands.

Alas, the pandemic police never showed up to inspect us during our 14-day quarantine. They relied on our sense of civic responsibility — and those threats of giant fines — to keep us in line.

But that’s the point. Canada hasn’t needed heroic or draconian measures beyond an initial lockdown to get the pandemic under control. All it needed was a set of sensible rules — and, crucially, a consensus across political parties that the rules were there to be followed.

That path was available to the United States, too. It’s a shame we didn’t take it.