Shouting is no substitute for policy

Catherine Mckenna, the infrastructure minister, revealed the dirty little secret of modern politics when she was caught on camera saying that if politicians holler their talking points, then repeat them louder still, “people will totally believe it.

Bill Blair, the public safety minister, tested the theory on Twitter last weekend when he said his government has “prohibited non-essential travel to Canada” for over a year.

“International travel is responsible for <2% of COVID-19 cases across Canada and, as the province’s own data shows, around 1% in Ontario,” he said.

The subliminal message here is that Ottawa has been on guard for thee and the surge in infections in Ontario is solely the result of the provincial government’s dereliction.

Expect to hear variations of that line repeated loudly in the coming months, since the government knows that its handling of the border is a vulnerable heel.

Conservative leader Erin O’toole hopes he can conduct anger at the flareup in infections in Justin Trudeau’s direction. “The Trudeau government has categorically failed to keep COVID variants out of Canada, failed to keep our border under control and failed to secure vaccines in January and February. This is Justin Trudeau’s third wave,” he said.

That is as absolute in its condemnation of the federal government as Blair’s tweet is in its exculpation.

The truth is, as usual, somewhere in between competing political claims. Ottawa was slow to respond to COVID at the border, in part because that is the advice it was receiving from the World Health Organization, which kept repeating the mantra that the “disease knows no borders.” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’S director-general, was still telling people that travel restrictions could do more harm than good, as the virus spread beyond China in late January 2020.

Most Western countries, with the notable exceptions of Australia and New Zealand, targeted their efforts at countries with confirmed COVID cases, didn’t enforce quarantine restrictions until it was too late and excluded certain groups from travel bans. Canadians who have barely moved out of their own shadow in the past year will be amazed to learn that 12 million people have entered the country by land and air since March 21, 2020.

To put that in context, that compares to 97 million in 2019. But it undermines the impression Blair is trying to create that the government has protected Canadians behind an impenetrable screen.

It was only on Jan. 7 that a negative COVID test was required on flights entering Canada. When this country introduced its mandatory quarantine program in February, a similar policy had been in place in Australia for nearly a year.

While non-essential travel was restricted at the Canada-u.s. land crossing, arrivals at the 117 two-way land crossings could self-quarantine or isolate because there were insufficient resources to screen, test and quarantine new arrivals. The option of reducing the number of crossings, in similar fashion to the way international arrivals were limited to four airports, was never implemented.

Even when new variants began to appear, the measures adopted were ineffectual, because the government fell back on the misleading data that Blair quoted — that international travel is responsible for less than two per cent of cases.

Who says cases attributable to travel have been undercounted? The Public Health Agency of Canada, that’s who. A footnote on the government’s own international travel cases says: “This is an underestimate of the total number of cases concerning returning travellers, as exposure history is not available for all cases.”

In fact, the daily epidemiological update for April 25 says 48.6 per cent of cases were contracted from “an unknown source.”

Kelley Lee, professor of global health policy at Simon Fraser University, and Annemarie Nicol, an associate professor of health sciences at the same institution, recently noted that the argument against stronger travel-related measures relies on PHAC’S data, which suggest the low risk from travel. Yet the numbers Blair quotes only count those direct cases involving air passengers. Any subsequent community transmission by travellers is not officially counted. Cases involving land or sea travellers are not included. No data are collected on interprovincial travel, beyond detected exposures on domestic flights.

In its rosy view of border control, the government assumes that all international arrivals adhere to its mandatory 14-day quarantine. But given the limited enforcement, Lee and Nicol note that some arrivals may not quarantine properly, if at all.

The bottom line is that travel and COVID are inextricably linked, with international flights from all over the world — not just India and Pakistan — bringing in new infections every day.

Lee said Blair has it the wrong way round. “We have community transmission because we have international travel. These cases are seeding huge numbers of other cases,” she said in an interview. “What if we get a variant that isn’t stopped by vaccines? We may be back to square one, so we have to fix this.”

If ministers are making bogus claims about their performance, opposition parties are underplaying the impact of tighter border policies.

Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at Toronto General Hospital, said there are plenty of loopholes in the system that have allowed a variant like B.1.1.7, which originated in the U.K., to become the dominant variant in this country.

But tighter border measures come at a cost. “If you restrict travel, you will halt the spread of COVID-19. It’s as simple as that. But there are no free lunches,” he said. “We need to have an honest and open conversation with Canadians when the dust settles, about what to do next time this happens. Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

Travellers crossing into Canada include 110,000 truck drivers every week. Many passenger flights carry cargo in their holds. Hermetically sealing the country would disrupt supply chains and cause great hardship.

Nevertheless, a 30-day circuit-breaker on domestic and international travel should have been introduced earlier this year to sap energy from the third wave.

Whether it would be justified to ward off a fourth wave is hard to gauge, given the opacity of the data.

The blame for that lies squarely at the door of a Liberal government that would rather repeat its talking point ever more loudly than get an accurate measure of the spread of the virus because of travel.