Will the East Coast burst its bubble?
N.S. premier wants to kick start tourism, but some aren’t having it
Next month, like many parents, Raven Watts will be getting her daughter ready for school.
And, like many parents, she’s not sure what her seven-yearold will face once she gets there.
She knows that once Lucy gets to school in Dartmouth, N.S., she’ll spend her day indoors, in classrooms with 20 to 25 classmates for whom, critics say, proper social distancing will be impossible.
Those are facts Watts has come to terms with. What she’s not ready for is the possibility that as Lucy goes back to school, there may be fertile ground for a slew of new coronavirus cases if the provincial government opens up Nova Scotia to visitors from outside the Atlantic bubble.
“I’m pretty sure my blood pressure would be through the roof,” Watts said. “Quite honestly, the … idea of the Atlantic bubble being open and me sending her to school is really terrifying.”
It’s a concern she shares with more than 130 other parents with children in the Nova Scotia school system who are part of Parents for a Pandemic Education Plan.
That group responded to the province’s education plan last month, saying it was encouraged but deeply concerned about the idea of opening Nova Scotia to provinces outside the Atlantic bubble.
“Eliminating the existing quarantine restrictions for those who arrive from other provinces, when the number of COVID-19 cases are rising quickly in Quebec, Ontario and Alberta, is not safe,” it said in a statement.
Last month, a few days after announcing the education plan, Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil made what appeared to be a surprising announcement.
Despite the province having gone, at that point, two weeks without a new case of COVID-19, McNeil issued a mandatory mask order for all indoor public spaces, beginning July 31.
Why would a province with so few coronavirus cases, in a region with the lowest infection rate in the country, adopt such measures?
For McNeil, who has since announced he plans to retire from politics, the answer appears to be short-term pain for longterm gain.
The gamble he’s eyeing is one that every provincial leader will have to face eventually: whether to sacrifice some of the gains in fighting the coronavirus for the sake of boosting the economy.
Since the beginning of July, the four Atlantic Provinces have created a bubble, wherein residents can travel freely within Atlantic Canada without having to self-isolate. Any visitors from outside the bubble are required to self-isolate for 14 days. Currently, there are no active cases of COVID-19 in Nova Scotia.
McNeil may hope that getting Nova Scotians used to the idea of wearing masks indoors will mitigate an expected spike in coronavirus cases when he allows the rest of Canada to visit.
And with only a handful of weeks left in the summer, he’d undoubtedly like to open those doors sooner rather than later, to take advantage of what remains of the province’s peak tourism window.
Like most other provinces, Nova Scotia has been hemorrhaging money since the beginning of the pandemic. A fiscal update released at the end of
July projected the province will be $853 million in the red for this year. That’s a far cry from the $55-million surplus the province was expecting to run pre-COVID.
“What we’re looking at is how do we open up to the rest of Canada,” said McNeil on July 24, when he announced the mandatory mask policy. “We cannot continue to keep ourselves locked down.
“We need to begin to open up our economy and begin to start rebuilding the economic future and the economic health of our province as we continue to protect the public health of Nova Scotians.”
A large part of that economic boost could come from tourism. While creating the Atlantic bubble has helped, a far greater portion of Nova Scotia’s Canadian tourism income typically comes from outside the Atlantic Provinces.
In 2019, visitors from P.E.I., Newfoundland and New Brunswick made up about 25 per cent of tourism revenues, spending $400 million in the province. Over the same period, visitors from outside Atlantic Canada made up 50 per cent of tourism revenues, spending $790 million.
For Raven Watts and parents like her, however, opening up the province at about the same time that children are navigating suddenly unfamiliar school surroundings is one unknown too many.
“We talk about a second wave being inevitable, but inviting that in when our kids are the most vulnerable … because they’re not going to be able to follow basic public health guidelines … it just seems irresponsible and such a pivot from how Nova Scotia has dealt with the pandemic thus far,” she said.
For Watts, ideally the province would wait until all the schools in the country have been open a month or so, then observe the case counts from other provinces before allowing outsiders into Nova Scotia.
Although he has been adamant about the necessity, Premier McNeil has not set a timeline for opening up. And he has said repeatedly that he will use public health as the yardstick for doing so.
The premiers of the other three Atlantic Provinces seem to be adopting a less urgent pace.
As it stands now, any visitor to Nova Scotia who goes through the self-isolation process is free to travel throughout Atlantic Canada. If Nova Scotia tosses out the self-isolation requirement before the other three provinces are ready to do so, that will almost certainly strain the bubble concept — maybe even enough to pop the bubble.
“There’s a lot of pressure to open up across the country,” said New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs at a July 30 briefing. “And we’re not there yet. And my colleagues, certainly in P.E.I. and in Newfoundland, are in the same position.”
McNeil’s decision to make mask-wearing mandatory is reasonable and provides a relatively easy level of protection, said Susan Kirkland, head of the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, even if the idea of opening the province doesn’t thrill her.
“I understand that there’s reasons for doing this … as an epidemiologist, I’d keep our bubble as long as I could, because I think it gives us a layer of protection. And we’ve demonstrated that we can make it work,” said Kirkland, who’s also a member of the federal COVID-19 Immunity Task Force.
But she acknowledges that provinces can’t remain in their own bubbles forever.
Opening up to the rest of Canada will certainly expose Nova Scotians to a higher level of risk, she said. As of Aug. 10, Ontario had 33 active cases of COVID-19 and a cumulative case count of 40,194. Nova Scotia had zero active cases and a cumulative case count of 1,017.
With more cases potentially on the way, mask wearing is one thing, but Kirkland said testing and contact tracing are even more essential. And the province’s shortcomings in those departments are worrisome to her.
“We absolutely have to be able to do an adequate amount of testing … not just to symptomatic people, but of asymptomatic people as well,” she said. “We have the capacity to test I think, 1,500 or 1,600 people a day, but we’re nowhere near those numbers.” Nova Scotia has averaged 372 tests daily for the last seven days.
“(Also) it’s a very resource-intensive thing to do to track people’s contacts. And it’s necessary to do it in a timely fashion. I’m a little bit worried that, should we start to all of a sudden see a large number of increases in cases, I think that the capacity would be reached very quickly.”
For Watts, whose school supplies for her daughter this year will include a pack of face masks and hand sanitizer, that limited capacity is troubling.
“It just feels really risky at a time when our kids need us to be more cautious than ever.”