National Post (National Edition)
Hotel-quarantine debacle still needs answering for
Another astonishing pandemic public expenditure landed with a thud this week in Ottawa: The Public Health Agency of Canada reports spending $6.8 million in the 2022 fiscal year to put 15 travellers in 14-day quarantine at the Westin Calgary Airport hotel. That works out to more than $450,000 per person, and more than $32,000 per night. And if it weren't for that eye-watering figure, the government's Westin Calgary bill for 2020 might seem pretty astronomical as well: Roughly $75,000 per person, or $5,000 per night.
Unlike some other mind-boggling COVID expenditures, though (the $54-million Arrive CAN app comes to mind) this is at least halfway explicable. The 14-day quarantine-at-home rule wasn't at all controversial when it was implemented in March 2020. Arriving passengers who didn't have suitable quarantine accommodations, as determined by a PHAC officer, needed somewhere to go. Hotels made sense.
To be clear: We're not talking about the hotel rooms returning Canadian passengers had to book and pay for themselves, beginning early in 2021. But this is a good opportunity to revisit that debacle — and to remind ourselves of the reckoning Canadian governments are owed for their pandemic management.
A refresher may be in order. In early 2021, after rolling their eyes theatrically for weeks and months at any suggestion of mandatory hotel quarantine, the federal Liberals decided to implement it. Thenceforward you needed a negative PCR test to get on a flight to Canada; you took another PCR test upon arrival; and you had to book a hotel room — often at larcenous rates — for three days to await the result of that second test, after which you could continue quarantining at home.
There were two possible justifications for this. One was as part of a concerted, New Zealand-style pursuit of “zero COVID.” Canada never even pretended to play in that league. That left the second possible justification: keeping new strains of COVID out of the country. “We know that just one case of the variant that comes in could cause significant challenges,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the time. “That is why we need to take extra measures.”
Canada's regime did not do that and could not have done that, for starters because mandatory hotel quarantine only lasted three days. “Hotel quarantine of up to three days is inconsistent with the incubation period of SARS-CoV-2,” the government's own Testing and Screening Advisory Panel declared in May 2021.
More ridiculously, at no point did this rule apply to people entering the country by road — which is to say the vast majority of people entering the country at the time. Commercial drivers weren't even tested, never mind quarantined. (At the time, most Canadian public health officials seemed to view rapid antigen tests as a form of cheating.) “Approximately 92 per cent of travellers (arriving by land) are exempt from quarantine,” a Canada Border Services Agency spokesperson told me two years ago. And never mind the land border: In April 2021, the National Post reported that nearly 25 per cent of passengers arriving even by air were also deemed exempt from mandatory hotel quarantine.
Let's see, what else? There was no medically secure transport available between the airports and the hotels. Some quarantine hotels were open to other guests as well. Some imposed standardized check-in times on their quarantine guests, leaving many milling around in the lobby, marinating in each others' droplets. There were at least two reported sexual assaults. “Guests” weren't even allowed to get food or other items delivered.
The program didn't apply to temporary agricultural workers, because ... well, there's really no way to finish that sentence. It applied to travellers from every country equally, COVID-zero and COVID-infinite alike. If you were prepared to risk a considerable fine, you could just flip Canadian officialdom the bird and hop in an Uber. This was particularly true in Alberta, which, it turned out, had no agreement with Ottawa to issue simple tickets for Quarantine Act transgressions.
PHAC has no idea whether any of those fines have been paid, naturally, and few provinces make that data available to inquiring journalists. One is British Columbia. As of late last year, CBC reported, three per cent of the 3,267 quarantine-violation tickets issued in B.C. had been paid.
This is all perfectly understandable, but not in a way that looks good on the government. It was all purely punitive. Over the 2020 Christmas holidays, thanks in no small part to then Ontario cabinet minister Rod Phillips's spectacularly ill-advised trip to St. Barts, Canadians decided they wanted to see foreign travellers punished for their amusement. The Liberals, having argued for weeks that none of this was necessary, were only too happy to switch gears and divert attention from their other spectacular failures. It was wretched, and it needs answering for — not so much for the travellers affected, but for the sake of good governance in general.
With every passing week, as blessed normalcy returns and threatens to stick around, we hear less and less about a public inquiry into Ottawa's pandemic management, which we all seemed to agree, once upon a time, was desperately necessary. It is just as desperately necessary as ever, and not just in preparation for another pandemic. This federal government screws things up just as spectacularly, for all the wrong reasons, all the time. We deserve so much better.