Liberals slow to act from Day 1
Nobody should underestimate the difficulty of governing a country like Canada. Contrary to popular belief, our political leaders are not idiots — at least many of them are not. But they face competing interests that often makes inertia the path of least resistance.
In the case of Canada’s border policy during the pandemic, the federal government is under pressure to relax restrictions from businesses and returning Canadians insisting on their Charter mobility rights. A group of Snowbirds lost a case in Federal Court this week that argued being forced to stay in a quarantine hotel would cause “devastating, emotional, relational and spiritual harm,” a sentiment that will find favour with anyone who has endured an airport hotel breakfast. But no one denies their right of return.
At the same time, as varieties of concern have proliferated, there have been competing demands to tighten borders, a call Ottawa has done its best to ignore by pointing to data that suggest the risk from travel is low. To do otherwise would be to concede that it failed to protect Canadians with an effective border shield early in the pandemic.
When other countries like Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and Vietnam closed their borders, Canadian cabinet ministers argued that such moves were counterproductive and laid out the welcome mat. Having made such a catastrophic error, policy has been designed to cover the government’s tracks.
Bill Blair, the public safety minister, said on Twitter that international travel is responsible for less than two per cent of COVID cases, a statistic taken from the Public Health Agency of Canada, which concedes that its numbers “underestimate” the spread of the virus by returning travellers.
The statement was a lightning rod for criticism, satirized by one online wit, who pointed out that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand accounted for less than one per cent of all shots fired in the First World War.
But there is a serious side to having fun with numbers. Winston Bharat, a Toronto-area doctor, offered a stark example of why the government’s data cannot be trusted, based on the deaths of 70 residents at the Roberta Place long-term care facility in Barrie, Ont., last January.
An employee at the facility contracted the U.K. variant from a returning traveller who was quarantining in the same household. It quickly spread through the residence, infecting 220 people and killing 70 residents and one caregiver. Tragically, Roberta Place’s allotment of Moderna vaccine was diverted at the last minute to other care homes before it could be administered.
When the cases were classified by the local health unit, few, if any, were designated as being travel-related (Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit noted 3,430 COVID cases between Dec. 20, 2020, and Feb. 28, only 48 of which were travel-related. Of the 48, only eight were from the 50-plus age group).
This makes a nonsense of the idea that Canada has reliable information on which to base border policy decisions. The Public Health Agency admits that not all jurisdictions report exposure history — hence its concession that cases attributable to travel are undercounted.
This is not a semantic point but one over which the government remains in denial.
James Cudmore, Blair’s director of communications, said that since Ottawa imposed restrictions last year, the number of cases attributed to travellers declined from a monthly average of 22.3 per cent in March 2020 to 0.4 per cent in March 2021. “There is no reason to doubt these data,” he said. “These facts show our approach is working. As the pandemic evolves, so too will our response.”
That interpretation of the chain of infection is hardly holistic and is partial to the government’s view that border measures are, and have been, adeptly handled.
Minimizing the problem allows Ottawa to argue that the risks from travel are low and stronger restrictions are not required. If there is nothing to see here, the Trudeau government does not have a case to answer.
It was only because of the public outcry — including from MPS, provincial and regional governments — that the Trudeau government announced a temporary ban on flights from India and Pakistan late last week. The government has known for weeks that flights from India accounted for 20 per cent of passengers but 50 per cent of infections.
Trudeau and Blair have touted Canada as having “amongst the strongest border measures in the world” — a fine example of this government’s belief that information is based on repetition (say it often enough, loudly enough, it becomes true in the public mind).
It’s true that Canada’s testing and quarantine requirements have become more stringent in the past three months in airport arrivals and at land borders.
It is equally true that Ottawa has been ill-disposed to act from day one of the pandemic — and when it has, the response has often been ad hoc.
Mandatory pre-flight testing was not required until January and mandatory quarantine measures were only introduced in February. Even now, travellers are sidestepping restrictions by landing in the U.S. and entering Canada by land to avoid obligatory quarantine. Some are paying $3,000 fines, rather than spending $2,000 on quarantine hotels.
All governments face competing interests but the overriding duty is to protect citizens. An Australian-style travel ban in January would have saved countless lives, including in Roberta Place, and possibly averted a third wave.
Tighter rules now — vaccinating truckers, reducing the number of border crossings, beefing up quarantine enforcement for land travellers, and grounding domestic and international flights temporarily — would ensure we don’t have to endure a fourth wave. But doing so would acknowledge a problem the government insists does not exist.