Thousands whisked off to secret facilities
A return to Canada from travels abroad could land you in one of the federal government’s isolation hotels, dystopian-looking places sheathed in plastic, with meals delivered to your door and only minutes of fresh air per day.
There has been ongoing confusion around the rules at Canada’s airports since the beginning of the pandemic. Who can fly and who cannot? Testing or not? In early January, the government brought in rules that required air travellers to have a negative COVID test on arrival at Canada’s airports. Then, two weeks ago, came the announcement of a mandatory, 72-hour hotel quarantine for all international travellers — at their own expense. On Friday, it was revealed these government-approved, privately operated hotels will come online on Feb. 22.
Yet, more than 5,000 people have already been whisked off to government isolation facilities since the start of the pandemic. Operated by Public Health Canada, these “last resort” facilities — for people who lacked proper COVID tests, or a safe place to isolate for 14 days — are hardly what one would describe as a relaxing home-away-from-home.
The specific locations and many other details — from who’s providing the food to whether smokers can step outside for a cigarette — have been kept secret by the government.
Angelo Vanegas says he spent 14 days quarantined at one of the designated facilities in Calgary after returning from a visit with family in Mexico in mid-January. He told the National Post he was whisked away from the Calgary airport to the facility in a vehicle with blacked-out windows.
“You can’t see the driver or anything. Once you arrive at the facility they start telling you the rules … you’re not allowed to order UberEats or Skip The Dishes, you’re not allowed to tell the location to even your own family,” Vanegas said.
What landed him there? Before flying back to Canada, Vanegas says he paid around US$200 in Mexico for a COVID test that he was assured would be acceptable, and had hoped to spend his quarantine at home. The test wasn’t accepted and the screening officer at the Calgary airport told him he would need to quarantine in a hotel, Vanegas said.
At the hotel, he says he had literally nothing to do. Three meals a day were delivered, though he described them as small portions. He got 15 minutes outside per day, but because of an infected toenail that eventually necessitated a hospital visit, he wasn’t able to take advantage of it. There was wifi, but of the shoddy quality you’d expect from a hotel. Vanegas used his phone’s data.
“There was nothing to do, you were not allowed to talk to the security guard, you were not allowed to talk to other guests,” he said.
Phoning his family, he said, was “what actually kept me alive, from the misery.”
There are 11 of the government-operated quarantine sites in nine cities across the country, plus two more operated by provinces or territories. The sites are in: Whitehorse, Vancouver, Kelowna, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, Fredericton, Halifax and St. John’s.
As of Jan. 24, the federal government says 717 people have been quarantined at designated sites in British Columbia, 215 in Alberta, four in Saskatchewan and 112 in Manitoba. A further 790 have been quarantined in Quebec, 78 across the Atlantic provinces, and three in the Yukon. There have been 3,111 people held in one in Ontario.
Federal public health officials declined to answer the National Post‘s questions about these quarantine facilities, including: who is providing security at the sites, how much time people can spend outside, are there smoking and non-smoking rooms, are they manned by hotel staff or public health staff, who is providing the food at the hotels?
They also did not answer whether any of these hotels will be the same hotels participating in the mandatory 72-hour quarantine program for all international travellers as of Feb. 22.
Other stories of miserable stays in these facilities have been reported on social media, with some referring to them as secret camps in Canada.
Such reports prompted the Public Health Agency of Canada to take to Twitter to dispel misinformation. “Federally designated quarantine sites, typically hotel rooms, are not internment camps,” the tweet said.
But confusion around the quarantine centres, combined with the secrecy of the facilities, has continued to capture attention, while raising questions around constitutional freedoms.