Quebec’s curfew unlikely to work as hoped for
The very limited good news for Quebecers is that the Canadiens kick off their 112th season next Wednesday evening against the Leafs. They’ll play their first home game at an empty Bell Centre on Jan. 28, against Calgary. The hockey millionaires will presumably enjoy special treatment under the province’s new four-week super-deluxe lockdown, announced Wednesday by Premier François Legault, which will see 8.6 million citizens confined to their homes from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. on pain of arrest. Many Quebecers might quite understandably object to that. But it’ll be nice to have something to watch on TV at least.
All else is woe. As of Wednesday, Quebec’s seven- day average new case rate was 301 per million, leading second- place Alberta by 28 per cent and third- place Ontario by 44 per cent. Alberta and Manitoba peaked even higher in late November and early December, but numbers in the Western provinces have fallen significantly since then without anything so draconian as a curfew in place. The same cannot be said for Ontario and Quebec, where cases have trended relentlessly upward since November.
The vaccines are here, but the rollout has been — to be charitable — less than impressive. Meanwhile longterm care homes, where at least three- quarters of deaths have occurred, remain devastatingly vulnerable. So now, because governments can’t get their act together and some critical mass of citizens can’t or won’t take the precautions necessary not to spread and catch the virus, you can’t go for a healthy walk after 8 p. m. in Canada’s secondmost-populous province unless you have a dog.
Dogs literally count more now. It’s grotesque, and Ontario may well be next.
Grotesque things are sometimes necessary, of course, but it’s tough to see this as an example. If police are going to check people’s documentation to see if they’re allowed out for work, as Legault says they will, then surely they could also check IDS among individuals or families out for an evening constitutional to ensure they live in the neighbourhood. But perhaps that wouldn’t satisfy Legault’s desire to impose “shock therapy” on the province, or public health director Horacio Arruda’s desire to send “a signal” that they’re really, really serious this time.
Only they’re not really, really serious. On Wednesday, government officials admitted they have no evidence to suggest curfews work in general, or that this one would work specifically. The potential drawbacks are obvious: If people only have three hours after work to shop for groceries and other essentials, as opposed to five or more, that could create more crowded stores. And then there are the public- health concerns, which have been acute all along — but literally locking people in their houses for nine hours a day ratchets up the risk enormously.
And the fact is, curfews are a measure more associated with past failure than future success: Among countries remotely comparable to Canada that have seen fewer overall cases per capita, only Australia has ever scored three out of three points — i. e., the most stringent — on the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker’s stay-at-home order indicator.
Whatever you think of Melbourne’s restrictions, they were certainly more likely to knock down COVID-19 cases. Regulations concurrent with Melbourne’s curfew included severe restrictions on manufacturing, construction and even essential- service workplaces such as meat packing.
Legault’s government teased such measures to media in advance of Wednesday’s announcement, but in the end merely “requested” such businesses scale down operations. The whole premise of the curfew is that folks aren’t listening.
Melbourne- style restrictions are part of the idea behind the so- called “Canadian Shield” plan, released last week by a panel of experts calling themselves the COVID Strategic Choices Group and advanced in these pages by my colleague John Ivison on Monday. But the plan envisions such restrictions dovetailing with several “massive” undertakings by governments that have singularly failed to do anything massive thus far.
Governments must “massively expand quick testing of asymptomatic Canadians,” for example. Quebec dragged its heels even deploying the 1.3 million rapid tests it got from Ottawa, which is not a massive number relative to 8.6 million Quebecers. “Massive” is testing your entire 5.5 million population over two weekends, as Slovakia did in November, or Austria securing more tests than there are Austrians for a pre- holiday blitz. (None of the tests those countries used are even approved by Health Canada.) Governments must “massively increase isolation and support,” such as “isolation hotels” for people in crowded or multi-member households. It has been nine months, 16,000 are dead and you can count the number of such facilities in this country on three hands. Why would governments go massive now?
Governments must “massively expand PCR tests” as well, the plan says. Victoria, the state of which Melbourne is capital, is currently testing roughly 15 per cent more people per day with than Quebec, which has 500 times as many active cases.
It does not bode well. Go vaccine. Go Habs.