How hard will it be to reopen? Look no further than our neighbours in Quebec,
How hard will it be to start Ontario’s economy? Watch our neighbours
TROIS-RIVIÈRES, QUE.— Few people were more excited with the Quebec government’s plan to reopen stores and schools in the epicentre of Canada’s coronavirus outbreak than Annabelle Chouinard.
The dress designer and owner of the go-to wedding gown shop for graduates and brides in many of the smaller towns that lie between Montreal and Quebec City was excited and anxious — but mostly desperate — to get back to the store she opened in 1996 at the age of 18.
“My only thought was, I have to open on May 4! I have to open on May 4!” said Chouinard, 43, owner of Vice et Vertu, which operates out of a former school in Trois-Rivières.
She bought hand sanitizer, disinfectant and disposable masks. She reorganized her fitting rooms.
Dresses to be tried on this week were hung out on a rack three days ahead of the customers’ appointment to eliminate any risk of contamination from the COVID-19 virus.
There was a separate rack for garments that had been tried and needed to be put back into one of two storage rooms that hold more than 1,500 dresses of all shapes, sizes and colours. There, the potentially contaminated garments would hang in quarantine for seven days.
Chouinard prides herself on offering not just dresses, but the dress-shopping experience. Exposing customers to infection was not an option. But she quickly discovered how difficult it was to offer the former without risking the latter.
“You think, OK, the client will go in the fitting room, but they can’t touch the curtain. Then you ask yourself, how can we manage it so they can try on 12 gowns? You realize that, no, no, it doesn’t work.”
She had thought of almost everything, but her optimism had blinded her to one big problem.
“I arrived (last) Monday morning and the telephone wasn’t ringing,” she said, “because buying a dress is no one’s priority.”
Quebec is like any other Canadian province in that respect. Fancy fabrics and threads, unless they wrap around the head and cover the nose and mouth, are the last thing on the minds of most people. The summer wedding season is a bust. It’s easier to put vows on hold for a year than to celebrate the coming together of lovers in a socially distant manner. Graduations are up in the air, too. Secondary school students won’t be going back to class until the fall. Where Quebec has stood apart is in its decision to return to something-like-normal in a way that even jurisdictions with milder coronavirus outbreaks have been unwilling to emulate.
Retails stores outside of the Montreal area opened this week. They will be followed on Monday by daycare centres and primary schools. Within the Montreal area — Quebec’s COVID-19 hot zone — stores are set to open on May 25, the same day that primary students will be welcomed back to class.
Perhaps “welcomed” is not the right word.
A May 1 letter to parents from the Riverside School Board, which covers the suburban communities south of Montreal, spelled out what students can expect when the school bell rings. After reading it, one parent wrote on Facebook that it sounded “absolutely insane … Our children will be in a jail basically.”
Although there will be no metal bars, there will be a “designated space” for each student, two metres from their closest classmate, that teachers cannot enter and students cannot leave, except for once-a-day recess. Outside, they will be barred from using playground equipment. No drama, gym, art or music instruction, either.
Due to space requirements, some students will return to different classrooms led by different teachers, perhaps in different schools altogether.
“I think it’s cruel for the kids, the parents and the teachers,” said Nadia Darpino, a Brossard mother of two children with special needs, neither of whom will be returning when their schools reopen. “It’s nonsense for four weeks only. I think they should not have opened, worked on their strategies for a couple of months between now and September and see what best fits for the schools.”
Teachers have spent the past week reconfiguring workspaces, adapting lesson plans and figuring out how to connect with their young charges wearing face masks, visors, gloves and other protective equipment that the government insists is unnecessary but has reluctantly agreed to provide.
“They are really concentrated right now on doing the work, but what they tell us is that they have butterflies, they have worries tied to their health,” said Richard Bergevin, president of a teacher’s union in Quebec’s Eastern Townships.
The union wanted to return to class in August, taking the time to properly prepare the schools, classes and students.
“If public health and the scientific community tells us that it’s the right time to reopen for society, then we the teachers will do our part to ensure that it goes well — or as well as possible,” Bergevin said.
Premier François Legault made the school announcements on April 27, saying that the virus posed a low risk for children, that school was important for students’ social development, and that sooner or later, life had to go on. Underlying it all was “science,” he said. “We have the OK of public health.”
But April 27 was the same day that the Institut national de santé publique du Québec, an expert body that advises Quebec’s Health Ministry, released a report warning that opening schools without strict controls could provoke a potentially dangerous second wave of the outbreak.
“It is certain that the infection of children would contribute to a substantial transmission of COVID-19 to their parents and to other adults around them,” the report said, which “could result in a large number of hospitalizations over a short period of time with the real potential to overwhelm the health network both in urban centres and in the regions.”
Dr. Horacio Arruda, Quebec’s director of public health, said the reopening of non-essential retail stores is also driven by public-health concerns, not economic imperatives.
“What I’m trying to say is that I want to avoid suicides among small business owners, divorces because it’s going badly, and violence toward their children,” Arruda said. “These are also health issues that we have to be able to measure.”
Other public-health experts say they would have preferred a slower, more cautious approach for Quebec, which as of Friday had recorded 2,725 deaths from COVID-19 and a total of 36,150 cases.
Kate Zinszer, an assistant professor in the department of social and preventive medicine at Université de Montréal, suggested that a pilot project over several weeks in an area lightly touched by the pandemic would have allowed officials to measure the drawbacks and advantages effects of reopening stores and schools. Those results could then be used to predict the impact of a wider loosening of restrictions.
Zinszer was, however, heartened to see the Montreal-area store openings delayed twice last week, to May 25 from an original date of May 11, because it indicated that authorities are willing and able to react quickly to a changing public-health situation in the province’s largest city and its hospitals.
Benoît Mâsse, a professor of biostatistics at Université de Montréal’s School of Public Health, said that any loosening of restrictions must be accompanied by more and quicker test results, and an army of tracers who can find those who’ve come in contact with a COVID-19 carrier and isolate them before they spread the virus.
The test numbers are rising but Quebec has so far failed to raise the army of tracers, without which the risk of a second wave and a second lockdown is great, he said.
Chouinard, the dress designer, believes it’s only a matter of time before the virus roars to life again.
“In clothing stores, when a lady wants the medium-size sweater and she has to touch the small and large to get to the medium, she’s contaminating left and right,” she said.
The owners of stores selling items with hard surfaces can conceivably spray and wipe every trace of one customer before the next comes along, but a single wedding gown takes an hour and a half to properly clean with a vapour machine.
That calculation has led Chouinard to a temporary solution as she surveys the bleak business horizon.
She will complete the 156 outstanding dress orders, collect the remaining payments to minimize her financial losses, and shut down her store at least until the fall.
“That’s what entrepreneurs are having to think about,” she said. “Do I open my store? Do I close it? Or do I wait?”