Border controls saga has been embarrassing
On the question of foreign travel in the time of COVID-19, there have been two dominant media narratives in Canada. There was “foreign travel does not matter and it is oafish to suggest otherwise”; then, briefly, there was “foreign travel is an abomination, let’s lock these awful people up in hotel rooms and charge them ludicrous sums.” Now, five months after Ontario’s then-finance minister Rod Phillips was discovered luxuriating in the French West Indies and set off a full-blown moral panic back on the farm, we are mostly back where we were: The border is “an issue,” sure, but it’s not “the issue,” and to the extent it is an issue it is manageable.
To wit: On Thursday, the COVID-19 Testing and Screening Expert Advisory Panel recommended a dramatic loosening of border regulations for international travellers: shorter quarantine for partially vaccinated travellers, no quarantine for fully vaccinated travellers, and scrapping the “mandatory three-day hotel quarantine” program — the one that’s famously not so mandatory.
In previous months, now might be a time of rising border angst. Cases are rising in the United Kingdom, albeit in clusters, apparently driven by the variant first identified in India, B.1.617. That variant hasn’t yet grabbed hold firmly anywhere in Canada. Canada currently bans flights from India, ostensibly in the name of keeping it away, but not from the U.K., which in turn does not ban flights from India. And yet all is quiet.
To be clear, as of Friday, cases in the U.K. have only “surged” nationwide to an average of 4.7 per 100,000 population per day — roughly half Canada’s current rate, and down hugely from a peak of 87. Maybe as more and more Canadians realize the vaccines really are the way out of this and accept that a return to real life is at hand, it’s just harder to stress out. Those are all OK reasons not to be freaking out about the border.
But we need to remember just how comprehensively the border was screwed up over the course of this pandemic — as fundamental a task of the federal government as health care and long-term care homes are of the provincial governments. How on Earth were we so dopily overconfident in our most basic anti-pandemic capabilities when — as Auditor General Karen Hogan reported this week — serious problems in basic PPE procurement had been common knowledge for more than a decade?
As for the mandatory hotel-quarantine program, the expert advisory panel’s polite summation of its performance does more to damn it in bureaucratese than anyone (me, for example) could in anger. “There are several issues related to mandatory government-authorized accommodation worthy of consideration,” the committee members venture. “First, some travellers are choosing to pay a fine of up to $3,000 rather than staying in a government-authorized accommodation or a designated quarantine facility.”
Right. That. Embarrassing. In Toronto or Vancouver, you’ll likely only get a ticket if you make a break for it. In Alberta, which hasn’t adopted the federal Contraventions Act, it’s not enforced at all! Police would have to lay Criminal Code charges instead of writing a ticket, and they understandably aren’t interested: As of mid-may, they hadn’t laid a single charge.
The program requires “significant administrative costs and resources,” the expert panel alleges, and is a “burden” on the participants. It makes no sense as a barrier to COVID-19 entering the country, it opines, inasmuch as it excludes land travel over the Canada-u.s. border, which counts for the vast majority of entries. Those were points two through four. My favourite, however, comes last: “Fifth, hotel quarantine of up to three days is inconsistent with the incubation period of SARS-COV-2.”
Oh right. That, too: It made no Earthly medical sense. It wouldn’t be at all rare for someone recently infected
SET OFF A FULL-BLOWN MORAL PANIC BACK ON THE FARM.
with COVID-19 to test negative to get on the plane and then again on arrival — and upon receipt of the latter result, be free to go home — while still being asymptomatic.
The panel could have suggested strengthening the system, of course, but it went the other way entirely and dismissed the whole idea: It suggested that a proper mandatory hotel-quarantine regime — i.e., one lasting 10 or 14 days — really only makes sense “in countries such as New Zealand and Australia that are pursuing an elimination strategy.” In countries that can’t, won’t or don’t want to — Canada is all three — the implication is, it’s just for show.
For now, as we bite our lips and hope things keep looking up, all this government hubris, incompetence, idiocy and otherwise profoundly sub-par performance quite understandably gets shoved in a closet. Getting back to normal is Job 1. But once real life has returned, tempting as it will be to put the whole ordeal behind us, that closet needs to be unpacked and aired out, and its contents autopsied, without delay. Much needs answering for.