National Post (National Edition)
Ottawa moves quickly on a travel ban this time
Keen to mulligan their early mistakes
It's nice to see the federal government has learned from its earlier mistakes. The only question now is whether it will matter.
On Sunday, the Canadian government announced that it was closing our airspace to commercial and private flights from the United Kingdom to Canada. Cargo flights would be permitted, as would be flights that are transiting Canada but not allowing passengers to disembark here. (Emergencies would still of course be accommodated, so a plane with a flaming engine can set down here if needed.) But overall, the intention is clear — for an initial period of at least 72 hours, no one can fly from the U.K. to Canada. This is in response to disturbing reports about a significant mutation in the COVID-19 virus. This mutation, now reportedly spreading rapidly in the U.K., does not, as far as we know, make the virus more lethal. But there is some early evidence that it has made COVID more contagious, perhaps markedly so.
There was always a danger of this. Viruses mutate all the time, but most of those mutations are, as far as us humans go, irrelevant. Mutations that materially change the threat posed by any given virus to us sentient bipeds are even more rare, but still something we knew was a very real possibility. Those mutations can even work to our advantage. If a virus is going to materially mutate, it can mutate in a way that makes it less lethal. It's a roll of the dice and you just can't predict in advance which way it will go. The British mutation is being studied closely by scientists all over the world, and we won't know much about it for some time. But shellshocked governments the world over aren't taking any chances. With the preliminary evidence thus far suggesting this version is better at spreading — and COVID was already awfully gregarious — countries all over the world are slamming the door shut on Britain. Canada wasn't the first, but we didn't dawdle, either.
It's a good call, and a prudent one, based on what we know, and more importantly don't know. But it's not hard to see in the government's haste its regret for, and awareness of, its own delayed response to the first wave. It's impossible to say whether a faster, stronger federal response in early 2020 would have spared Canada this grim pandemic. But we can say with absolute certainty that the Liberals barely tried. Even as the first wave's imminent arrival became blindingly obvious to Canadians, who bought up every roll of toilet paper in sight, the government continued to insist that the “risk to Canada is low.” That soothing mantra was repeated over and over right up until the moment that the risk to Canada was assured, because it was here. The government wasn't ready, hadn't closed the borders, hadn't meaningfully boosted airport screenings, hadn't secured stockpiles of personal protective equipment and, most important of all, clearly hadn't been straight with Canadians about the degree of risk.
The early months of 2020 seem like a long time ago, but that's not true. Think back and review some of the coverage from those days. The federal government is getting too much credit for its COVID-19 response. The opening months were a wreck of missed opportunities, delays, incomprehension and muddled communication (and that last one is still a problem). That shouldn't be forgotten, and it doesn't absolve any provincial leader of their failures to say so.
It might be forgotten, alas. Canadians have short memories and, in fairness, this year has thrown an awful lot at us. And the Liberals are obviously going to do everything in their power to help us forget. A strong response to isolate the U.K. now might help further marginalize those memories of the first wave, when we waited far too long to shut down travel into Canada and struggled to communicate even basic details of self-isolation for Canadians who returned from abroad. Readers may recall my column from March: I was one of those Canadians returning from abroad just as the bottom fell out, and despite the federal government's repeated declarations that it was on top of things at the airports, the opposite was true — that's why some provincial and local governments rushed their own personnel to the airports. They were plugging critical and obvious gaps in the federal response that the feds were falsely insisting did not exist.
Strong action now regarding this new British strain is good on its own merits; even if it proves an overreaction, we can simply lift the restrictions later. And strong action now also happens to suit the agenda for the federal Liberals, who are understandably keen to mulligan their early mistakes. This is a happy incidence of when the right thing to do and the politically expedient thing to do are the same thing.
But it's not clear that it's going to matter. Again, think back to the first wave: the virus we all thought of then as the Wuhan virus was brought into Canada by travellers from Iran and Italy, too. Once it got out, it was out, and there wasn't anything we could do about it. The same may well be true this time: the British strain is already known to have reached at least Italy, and may have spread further. Isolating the U.K. is smart, but it might be too late. There's every possibility that by the time scientists realized there was a new materially significant mutation, it was everywhere.
That leaves us back where we started: only by minimizing, to the lowest possible level, travel into Canada, and establishing firm quarantine and testing requirements for all arrivals, including our fellow citizens, can we hope to keep this new mutation, and future mutations or entirely new viruses altogether, out. Other countries understand this and have responded accordingly. We're still sticking to half-measures. We're imposing those half-measures faster, to be sure, and that is an improvement of sorts. Will it be enough to matter? Sure. If we get lucky.
And that's the grim reality. Too much of our emergency response planning, for this and other crises, still hinges on luck. Now would be a good time to change that, wouldn't you say?