So much for the ‘science’
As of Monday, you can get a haircut in Manitoba, or even enjoy a beer on a restaurant patio. Next door in Saskatchewan, you can visit the dentist or go fishing.
Over in New Brunswick, you can hit some golf balls or hang out with another family. And in Quebec, at least outside Montreal, you can even visit a retail store and look forward to shopping in Montreal next week … wait, no, actually you’ll have to wait another week. The province just changed the rules on that.
In Ontario, meanwhile, just hold your horses. You can visit a garden centre, but only for curb-side service. We’ll keep you posted for anything else.
Confusing? Certainly. As Canada cautiously, gradually emerges from its seven-week lockdown, it’s clear this will be a patchwork process, and there may be backward steps as well as forward ones.
In large part this is inevitable, even desirable. A country as big and varied as Canada can’t have a one-size-fits-all plan for what is known in Quebec as “deconfinement.”
Nor should it, given the vastly different experiences the provinces had with COVID-19. It barely touched New Brunswick, which has had no deaths, for example, but hit hard in Ontario and especially Quebec. No wonder the provinces are opening up in different ways and at different speeds.
But some of this can’t be easily explained away. The provinces locked down their economies at almost the same time, and all imposed strict physical distancing rules that followed the lead of national public health officials. We all did the same thing because the scientific advice about how to “flatten the curve” was the same across the country.
But now that the curve has indeed been flattened, with varying degrees of success, the provinces are going their own ways. And this is clearly being driven by a range of calculations involving politics, recent history and risk tolerance — plus, to be sure, advice from the public health experts.
How else to account for the fact that Quebec is eager to open up, even as it reported another 758 cases of COVID-19 on Monday, while Ontario is barely moving even though it had only 376 more cases?
True, Quebec rolled back on its plan to reopen retail stores in Montreal, delaying that for a week because hospitals there still have many coronavirus patients. But so far at least, it’s forging ahead with a plan to start reopening elementary schools on May 11 in the face of serious misgivings from parents and school officials.
The difference can’t be “science.” It involves a different appreciation of the difficult trade-offs involved — weighing the risk of a resurgence in the disease against the social and economic harm inflicted by the lockdown.
So people in some provinces must watch in frustration as those elsewhere start resuming something like normal life, while they keep being held back. They hear Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continue to advise people not to go outside “unless you absolutely have to” — while some provinces are sending an entirely different message.
This will be a testing time, more difficult in some ways than the weeks of total lockdown. At least then there was comfort in the fact that everyone was in the same boat, and staying home was pretty much the only option when all public life was closed down anyway.
Canadians showed overwhelmingly that they were prepared to sacrifice a lot to make sure COVID-19 didn’t overwhelm the health system. With remarkably few exceptions and little complaining, all things considered, they obeyed the rules and rallied to the cause of fighting the pandemic.
Now people in provinces that aren’t rushing to reopen will have to do more. They’ll have to keep exercising self-restraint for a while longer even as those whose governments are moving faster begin to taste life after the lockdown.