Why won't PM let us return to normal?

After a slow and stumbling start, COVID-19 vaccination rollout in Canada has achieved remarkable success. With 70 per cent of Canadians having received a first dose and 47 per cent now fully vaccinated, Canada is poised to overtake the United States in the next few days. By the time you read this, it will likely have already happened.

However, unlike in the U.S., Europe and the U.K., federal officials in Canada have been exceedingly slow in planning for a return to normalcy. It was only on July 15 that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau broadly hinted that the U.S.-Canada land border would reopen to fully vaccinated Americans in mid-August, and made a rather more vague suggestion that air travel may reopen to vaccinated international tourists in early September, assuming the current progress in vaccination continues. This is far from a definitive announcement. One positive step thus far is that fully vaccinated passengers arriving by air can now enter Canada without the need for a mandatory quarantine assuming that they have passed a COVID-19 screening before their travel and again upon arrival.

At present, the land border between Canada and the U.S. remains closed except to essential travellers, the longest such closure in peacetime history. This is despite protestations from the travel and tourism industry and legislators from Midwestern American states. Perhaps Trudeau's announcement was prompted by such pressures.

The French government has protested Canada's policy, saying there is no scientific reason for blocking travellers who are fully vaccinated and tested. Meanwhile, the Indian High Commission in Ottawa has protested Canada's continuing ban on direct flights from India. The ban was imposed April 22 in response to the Delta variant originating in India. After nearly three months, the continuing flight suspension is perplexing, given the high vaccination rate in Canada and the fact that the Delta variant is no longer confined to India but has spread throughout the world. What is more, Canada refuses to recognize COVID-19 molecular test results conducted in India.

This, plus the continuing flight ban forces returning passengers — including Canadian citizens and permanent residents — to travel via expensive and circuitous time-consuming routes that transit through one or more additional countries before being allowed to return to Canada. The Canadian government has in effect outsourced any potential risks of passengers returning from India to third countries. It makes little sense that India has been singled out for this treatment, a country where despite a slow start, vaccinations too are on the rise and cases are falling. While the flight suspension made sense in April, and I in fact argued for it before it happened, it doesn't make much sense now. Leaving aside Australia and New Zealand, which are pursuing a “zero COVID-19 strategy” with a hard border, Canada remains the only major country that makes it excruciatingly painful and expensive for its own citizens and residents to return home from India.

The larger problem is that the federal government appears to have no serious plan for a return to normalcy after the pandemic. Hints of a future reopening do not amount to a road map. By saying that vaccine passports fall under provincial jurisdiction, Trudeau has abdicated the federal government's responsibility in setting a sensible national policy that would facilitate travel both between provinces and at the international borders. Meanwhile, other countries are forging ahead with post pandemic planning, and several European countries already have a functioning system of vaccine passports that facilitates travel and access to indoor events such as concerts.

In many policy areas, there's a case to be made for decentralization, but that shouldn't apply to recovery from a global pandemic that has crippled normal life in Canada for close to a year and a half. The Trudeau government has spent billions of dollars helping workers and businesses during successive lockdowns, but it has peculiarly refused to assert its authority in setting guidelines on a return to normalcy. We had the peculiar situation where residents of Ontario were living under the longest continuous lockdown of any major country, while other provinces such as Alberta had more or less fully reopened. Ontario has finally reopened indoor dining and gyms as of July 16.

Prime Minister Trudeau seems remarkably reluctant to embrace the post pandemic world and allow Canadians to return to a life of normalcy, with only recent hints that things may change. Caution was abundantly justified when our vaccination rate was low, but at this point, it is starting to feel as if the government is reluctant to give up its control over our lives. The fact that such continued controls as the Canada-U.S. border closure are polling well suggests what Trudeau's motivations may be. After all, if you're gearing up for a fall election, you'll likely do what you think the voters want, before then asking for their vote. It will be interesting to see whether a fall election call will come hard on the heels of reopening the borders, or perhaps the reverse.

TRUDEAU SEEMS ... RELUCTANT TO EMBRACE THE POST PANDEMIC WORLD.