John Ivison: Mandatory hotel quarantine is a good idea poorly executed

The Canadian businessman who lodged a court challenge to quash the Trudeau government’s quarantine hotel program did not generate much sympathy.

With beach access from his home in Saint Martin, Dominic Colvin is hardly typical of the cash-strapped seniors that the Canadian Snowbird Association says would find it a hardship to pay the $2,000 for three nights in a government-approved hotel.

Opponents of what the government calls the “hotel stopover requirement” face an uphill battle.

A poll for Ipsos this week suggests that 83 per cent of Canadians support the new travel restrictions, even if 41 per cent think there should be some exceptions for people who left before the quarantine requirement came into effect.

Colvin’s lawyer, Jeffrey Rath, said his reaction to the new rule was: “Holy sh-t, I now live in East Germany and I’m a prisoner of the government of Canada.”

That’s risible. A three-night stay at the Holiday Inn Express Toronto Airport might be the only time you ask for a room without a view, but it’s not Mordor.

If you think this country is despotic, take a look at the giant internment camp of Australia. Outbound flights are banned and returning travellers are obliged to spend two weeks in quarantine hotels at their own expense, where they are confined to their rooms and barred from outdoor exercise.

Yet people still want to return home.

Around 40,000 Aussies remain stranded around the globe because there is a weekly cap of around 6,500 on new arrivals.

The upside of such tight restrictions is that Australia has had just 29,000 COVID cases and 900 deaths, compared to 849,517 cases and 21,723 deaths in Canada.

Australia’s quarantine program was introduced last March at a time when Canada’s health minister, Patty Hajdu, was ridiculing the idea. “Canadians think we can stop this at the border but what we see is a global pandemic, meaning that border measures are highly ineffective and some cases cause harm,” she said, with such certainty that she should be reminded of her hubris on a daily basis in the House of Commons.

Porous borders are responsible for 2.5 million travellers entering Canada since last March 21. Restrictions for most of that time amounted to little more than an honour system that urged new arrivals to self-quarantine. It was only on Jan. 7, that the government required travellers to provide proof of a negative COVID test before entering the country.

In sum, in a world awash with highly contagious variants of the virus, trying to stop this disease at the border is a very good idea.

But — and it is a big but — the policy has to be implemented properly.

If you are obliging people to stay in quarantine hotels, you need to be able to take their bookings and find them a room.
The early evidence is of yet another governmental cluster-flub.

The hotel booking number opened on Feb. 19, three days before the program became mandatory. In its first 72 hours, it received 45,000 calls. Yet only 2,277 rooms have been booked so far.

The Public Health Agency of Canada says the average wait time is two hours but anecdotal evidence suggests it has been considerably longer. A reporter for the Journal de Montreal waited 15 hours to book a room for a return from Florida.

PHAC says part of the problem is that a “significant proportion” of calls are from people looking to book hotel rooms in March and April.

The correct thing to do, it says, is wait to call within 48 hours of a scheduled flight.

It’s as if the government has been stunned by the number of Canadians who want to come home.

But it wasn’t just Ontario’s then finance minister, Rod Phillips, and half the Alberta provincial cabinet that left the country before Christmas.

Statistics Canada says 414,000 Canadian residents took trips abroad in December, the vast majority with the intention of returning home in the spring.

Public opinion supports the government policy of ensuring those travellers receive a negative COVID test result after arriving on Canadian soil.

But Canadians will lose patience if Ottawa can’t execute on its plan by finding hotels rooms for its returning citizens in an expeditious fashion.

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