Canada's foreign traveller freakout can lead to peril

It would be ideal if Mark Machin, the suddenly ex-president and ex-CEO of the Canada Pension Plan's investment portfolio, had secretly been terrible at his job. But he seemed to be faring pretty well in his sole function, which was (or ought to have been) to seek the maximum return on Canadians' pension investments. The CPP was comfortably outperforming its “reference portfolio” — a hypothetical bundle of stocks and bonds that doesn't try to significantly outperform the market. (The CPP adopted an “active management” strategy in 2006.)

The reference portfolio was down 3.1 per cent in fiscal 2020, as you might expect. As you might not expect, the CPP fund gained 3.1 per cent. Two weeks ago, the CPP reported its most lucrative quarterly haul ever: $23 billion, on a 5.1-per-cent net return.

Maybe that was despite Machin's performance, not because of it. Maybe he was constantly pushing massive investments in photofinishing and movie theatres. But that seems unlikely. It looks like Canada's astonishing moral panic over foreign travel essentially forced a guy doing a pretty good job managing nearly half-a-trillion dollars of our money to resign for the twin heresies of leaving the country, specifically to Dubai, and getting a COVID vaccine there, as The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

Perhaps Machin lost the respect of his staff. That would be a problem, no matter what the reason. But your boss leaving the country isn't a very good reason to lose respect for him. (If my boss made $5.4 million last year like Machin did, I wouldn't expect him to live even remotely like me. I would respect him less if he did!) Machin leaving the country certainly isn't a good reason for anyone who had never heard of him Thursday morning to have been demanding his head on a pike Thursday evening.

Honestly, this country needs a bucket of cold water in the face.

Fact: Machin getting vaccinated abroad is a net benefit to Canada. And if you have moral qualms about vaccine tourism, Dubai is probably the best place to go: The Sinopharm jab has been free and available to all adults living there since December. The Emirates trail only Israel in the world vaccine championships, with 59 doses per 100 people delivered. Canada is at 4.5. We are in no position to complain about outsourcing.

Machin reportedly got the Pfizer shot, so he wasn't even raiding the kitty, and is still in Dubai, awaiting his second dose, so he will return home fully vaccinated.

But in any event, another fact: A COVID-19 case arriving in Canada from another country is no bigger threat than one arriving from another province, another city or across the street. In theory, travel restrictions can keep us free of new variants of the virus. In practice, in Canada, they cannot.

With respect to the concerning British variant, it is much too late. Public health officials in Ontario and Alberta expect that strain to be dominant by March. We did not try to stop it, so it was not stopped.

The first case in Canada was detected on Boxing Day, when the federal government's official position was that worrying about the borders was a hysterical Conservative absurdity. Twelve days later, the feds started demanding a negative COVID test to get on a flight to Canada. Forty-six days after that, they started testing people on arrival. Those tests are likely to miss significant numbers of COVID-positive cases, never mind what strain. It's a very leaky system.

But it's not as leaky as the barrier between Canada and the United States. American citizens can get on direct flights from Sao Paulo to Miami, Dallas, Atlanta or New York; a quick connection in Amsterdam gets them home from Cape Town or Johannesburg. There is no requirement to test on arrival. Of the aforementioned jurisdictions, only New York State theoretically enforces a quarantine.

On the average day during the week ending Feb. 14, 5,628 people arrived at Canadian airports from abroad. And 24,640 people arrived from the United States by road — at least two-thirds of them exempt from any testing or quarantine requirements whatsoever.

That's not to say international travel is risk-free, or not worth worrying about at all. But good grief. The mania over foreign travellers is so obviously just a hot mess of class envy, recreational judgmentalism, paranoia and COVID cabin fever. And now is the worst time to let such base instincts take over. We have very serious issues to discuss as soberly as possible. At what point in the vaccination rollout do we start focusing on getting life back to normal? People cannot go on living like this. Vaccine passports, yes or no?

The most disturbing aspect of the foreign traveller freakout, to my mind, has been watching smart people cheer on the government making people's lives miserable for the crime of returning home. And all essentially for their own entertainment. It's a terrifying instinct that can lead to some terrifying places.

Every restriction on Canadians' freedoms implemented to fight the pandemic, including the many that were in my view entirely justified and several that were in my view not — Quebec's curfew being the most abominable — is now more likely to be implemented in future in any kind of crisis: pandemic, terrorist attack, civil disobedience, whatever. Governments are not known for relinquishing powers freely given by their constituents.

Canada is not special in this regard. Foreign travellers, foreign vaccine recipients, are not the enemy.