Provinces set to ease restrictions on Monday
Use of warning system under ‘full review’ after Nova Scotia shooting
OTTAWA—Provinces across the country are set to begin easing COVID-19 restrictions on Monday following a weekend in which thousands more cases of the respiratory illness were identified, hundreds more were reported dead and a much-ballyhooed made-in-Canada testing kit was recalled.
Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan are among those set to take another step out of lockdown by allowing the resumption of some economic and social activities that have been halted for more than a month due to the pandemic.
Ontario and Quebec aren’t going as far.
Ontario is allowing a small number of mostly seasonal businesses to reopen while Quebec is easing the lockdown on most retail stores outside the Montreal area, which has been hit hard by COVID-19 over the past month and a half.
Yet unlike the other provinces, Quebec’s plan to begin reopening comes as the province has shown little progress in curbing the illness’s spread, with another 1,800 positive cases and 183 deaths from the disease reported over the weekend.
Quebec Premier François Legault has previously defended plans to start reopening, noting most of the province’s deaths have been in long-term-care homes and arguing the fight against COVID-19 is entirely different in those facilities.
Quebec officials also added more than 1,300 cases to April’s count, saying those numbers weren’t originally included because of a technical problem. The province accounts for more than half of the Canadian cases of COVID-19, which includes more than 3,680 deaths.
Legault did not hold a briefing on Sunday, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other federal government officials sidestepped questions in Ottawa about the province’s plan to begin reopening even as more cases continue to be reported.
Those plans also include unlocking elementary schools and daycares across Quebec on May 11.
“Different regions will have different measures to bring in at different times and our job is to make sure we’re supporting them as best we can as we go through this carefully and step by step,” Trudeau said during his daily COVID-19 update.
That federal support includes obtaining enough protective equipment for workers as provinces open more segments of their economies, helping increase testing capacity and supporting research into COVID-19.
It was in that vein that Trudeau announced $175 million in federal funding to a Vancouver biotech company, AbCellera Biologics Inc., which the prime minister says has identified antibodies that could be used to create treatments or a vaccine.
Mounties in Nova Scotia are under scrutiny for not issuing an emergency alert as a gunman rampaged through rural communities, but there’s nothing in the national RCMP handbook to suggest that they should have.
In fact, the RCMP says there are currently no countrywide guidelines for when police should use Canada’s public warning system to broadcast information to cellphones and television screens.
In the wake of the mass murder that claimed 22 lives in Nova Scotia about two weeks ago, the force is looking into developing a national operational policy for using the emergency alert system.
But experts in law enforcement and emergency management say authorities must strike a delicate balance between informing the public about potential threats and avoiding unnecessary panic. And as the tragedy in Nova Scotia shows, they say those judgments aren’t always clear cut in the throes of crisis with lives on the line.
“Make no mistake — none of us have ever experienced the kind of chaos that those officers, first responders and even the critical incident commander faced that night,” said Terry Flynn, an associate professor of communications at McMaster
University.
“The critical thing for them is that now, they unfortunately have a mass shooting playbook.”
Before Canada launched its text-based national alert system in 2018, Flynn said RCMP considered social media to be the best way to communicate during a crisis.
Reviews of the 2014 shootings in Moncton, N.B., and on Parliament Hill found that Twitter was a critical tool for disseminating real-time information to the public and media as both incidents were unfolding.
In a similar vein, Nova Scotia RCMP used Twitter to send out updates as a firearms complaint in the tiny coastal village of Portapique on the evening of April 18 evolved into a shooting and arson spree across the central and northern parts of the province.
Mounties have faced questions about why they relied on social media to get the word out when they could have sent an emergency notification to every phone in the province. Some victims’ relatives have called for the issue to be examined as part of a public inquiry into the mass murder.
Premier Stephen McNeil has said emergency officials were ready to issue an alert, but couldn’t act until the RCMP supplied information. The Mounties say they were crafting a message when the gunman was fatally shot by police in Enfield, N.S., on April 19 after a 13-hour manhunt.
Nova Scotia RCMP Supt. Darren Campbell told reporters Tuesday that the force is conducting a “full review” of the use of the emergency alert system in consultation with the province and the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. National RCMP spokesperson Robin Percival said in an email that the force is looking at creating a Canada-wide policy, but said public alert protocols are generally set out by provincial emergency management authorities.
Nova Scotia’s Emergency Management Office didn’t immediately respond to a request for details about its protocols.
Flynn, who specializes in crisis management at McMaster, said instituting clear procedures and training about when to issue an emergency alert could save lives in situations where “seconds count.”
While it may seem wise for authorities to err on the side of caution, Flynn warned flooding people with notifications could foster “alert fatigue,” potentially prompting some to swipe away warnings about a present threat.