Freedom shouldn’t be something Canadians can only watch on social media.
TO EMERGE OR NOT TO EMERGE. THAT IS THE QUESTION. — REX MURPHY
Social media tells a tale of two Western worlds: the “haves” and the “have nots.” In the first category are places like America and the United Kingdom, where people enjoy freedoms like dinners with friends, live music, and hugging family members. Canada, on the other hand, is a have-not, where freedom takes a backseat to whatever’s easiest, cheapest, and sounds good in a live press conference.
Many Canadians, stuck at home with deteriorating mental health, social networks, and business prospects, see friends, family, and coworkers abroad regaining a semblance of normality and think, “why not us?” It’s a good question, and one that demands real answers in a liberal democracy.
Over the last year, Canadians were right to question politicians when they ignored the science on mask-wearing, border controls, and lockdowns. Governments consistently made bad choices because they didn’t want to make difficult ones. Now, as we near reopening, the pattern holds — except the calculus has flipped. Beleaguered by months of getting it wrong, Canadian politicians are afraid to get it right.
In the face of changing circumstances and new evidence, Canada should move more aggressively to restore personal liberties and reopen most businesses, particularly hard-hit small ones. At the same time, governments must turn their attention to the sectors clearly responsible for most spread: warehouses, factories, and schools. Politicians are loath to address these areas for reasons related to economics, lobbyists, and popular opinion, but, if they do, there’s no reason we can’t reopen this summer.
The U.K. continues to open at a steady clip, and plans to lift all restrictions by June 21 when 30 per cent of the population is fully vaccinated. Texas fully reopened in March and, despite much doomsaying, kept case counts under control. A new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper found exactly zero evidence Texas’ reopening affected COVID case rates. Meanwhile, Federal Minister of Health Patty Hajdu says Canadians may be able to enjoy “more activities indoors with people from outside our household” once a full 75 per cent of Canadians are vaccinated this fall.
A key takeaway from the new Texas study is lifting restrictions didn’t have a big impact on social mobility, likely because “the types of individuals who were affected by the policy” were “those least likely to affect the trajectory of COVID-19 growth.” Basically, people inclined to protect themselves have learned how to do so, and will continue to do so with or without government intervention. While Canadian governments love to lean on paternalistic policies, it’s time to trust the people. Rather than take away choices, they should actively empower people to make good ones.
There are two easy ways to do this: asymptomatic tests and widespread rapid tests. While Canada procured millions of rapid tests, outside of Nova Scotia, they’ve been rarer than a Maple Leafs championship win. That is to say, basically nonexistent. Sure, some are available at select pharmacies for $40 a pop, but rapid tests aren’t effective on a societal scale as special occasion favours.
They’re best used for mass testing drives like those seen in the U.K. where residents are given two free tests per week. Even Texas, though less widely reported in favour of more clickbait-y headlines about open bars, launched a program to give rapid tests to small businesses and offers widespread free curbside rapid testing to non-symptomatic individuals. While free asymptomatic PCR tests were available in Canada last summer, most provinces inexplicably stopped robust asymptomatic testing once it became too popular. As for rapid tests? Most politicians would rather not talk about those.
If you can empower most people to make good choices, you can then focus on protecting those who have fewer choices. These are largely essential workers in factories and warehouses, which even with iffy transparency standards, are clearly responsible for most workplace outbreaks and a large portion of community spread. Government focus should be on stemming the COVID tide here, not in backyards and small patios.
We also need to talk about the children. Schools as the “first to open and last to close” is a nice slogan and sounds noble in theory, but unfortunately the virus doesn’t much care whether it’s infecting people in an Amazon warehouse or a kindergarten class. Schools are important, but their risks must be dealt with.
You may remember Texas’ terrible fall surge. It turns out schools played a big role in that. Last week, the National Bureau of Economic Research released a study that found COVID cases “gradually but substantially accelerated” after students returned to in-person learning in Texas last September. Spread from schools represented 12 per cent of the state’s total cases during the eight weeks after reopening and 17 per cent of deaths. This was with a mask mandate and social distancing guidelines in Texas schools at the time.
What’s different now? In addition to other factors like vaccine uptake and natural immunity, many Texas students are still learning from home. In some districts, 70 per cent of kids continue to attend school virtually.
Signals from all over the world point to schools as a problem no one has effectively addressed. Just last week, Singapore, once heralded as a COVID success story, closed schools again, citing how new variants affect younger children. Meanwhile, a bout of controversy erupted in the U.K. as Downing Street tried to block data on new variant spread in schools from public release.
Unfortunately, Canada doesn’t really know how schools affect spread because we all but gave up on contact tracing and there’s been no significant period where schools have been open or closed independently of stay-at-home orders and small business shutdowns. We’ve also done very limited testing on students.
While the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) initially said schools weren’t widely responsible for spread, in late April they changed their tune, saying more transmissible variants and evolving transmission patterns mean “the difficult societal decision of closing schools will be a key public health question for multiple countries in the months ahead.” They advocate for better ventilation, increased asymptomatic testing, and even a reconsideration of age priorities for vaccines. On Friday, the CDC released a new report stressing the role of aerosol spread in schools, meaning masks aren’t enough. We need widespread testing and better ventilation.
Individual liberty is central to any democracy. While compromises were gladly made by most Canadians to combat COVID, politicians must aim to restore freedoms to gather, move freely, and make a living quickly as possible by aggressively targeting the areas that drive spread. What were once reasonable limits no longer look so reasonable in the light of even a one-dose summer. In the months ahead, freedom shouldn’t be something Canadians can only watch on social media.