It’s been more than a decade since the last time I had to travel by air … and even then it was still a far worse experience than it was before 9/11. Canada is among the last few countries to loosen Wuhan Coronavirus restrictions on international travel — along with two of Justin Trudeau’s favourite nations, the cuddly North Korean sole proprietorship and the “admirable” “basic dictatorship” in China. In the free-to-cheapskates weekly round-up of The Line, the editors have recent travel experiences at Canadian airports to discuss:
CBC News report on delays at Pearson International Airport in Toronto, 9 June, 2022.
Screencap from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkgmWWY2SDc
… Why couldn’t your Line editor browse the aisle? Well, because duty free is only for international travellers, and hanging around was forbidden due to “COVID protocols,” the clerk explained.
Now, was your Line editor going to stand around and pick a fight with some underpaid store clerk who was just following the rules? Absolutely not.
But she thought about it.
Look, we understand that not being able to browse is, on the list of first-world problems, really far down, but we had to admit that this stupid little non-incident made us angry. Just stupid, irrationally, bug-eyed angry for a solid minute or two.
Why? Because our entire lives have been eaten by a compounding collection of nonsensical COVID rules and restrictions that have added up to make everybody crazy and miserable, and this was just another. Everyone we know now has a story of peaking on COVID hysteria; experiencing a moment so surreal, inhumane and paranoid that it had the effect of fundamentally breaking trust in the judgement of public health and in broader institutional authority. Whether it was the moment they covered the outdoor playgrounds with police tape; the librarian who refused to let the potty-training toddler use the bathroom; the umpteenth school closure; the triple-masked mom screaming hysterically at her ward for touching other kids; to stories of being trapped for hours on end in airplanes or terminals. There was a moment when nearly all of us broke and took someone else’s head off. When we stopped clapping for health-care workers and instead grew quietly resentful, or found ways to silently flout COVID protocols — or abandoned the mainstream altogether and lost ourselves to fringe politics and conspiracy theories.
Upon arrival at one airport, one of your Line editors spotted a kids’ play area containing nothing more than a cartoonish carpet depicting a fun little airport runway. It was still closed. It is, apparently, still too dangerous to let kids burn off steam by pretending to be airplanes for a few minutes.
Even the Liberal backbench has been reported to be demanding that Justin Trudeau make some vague gestures to reduce the arbitrary and unscientific civil liberty restrictions we’ve been living under for what seems like forever … but he seems to like making Canadians miserable where and when he can.
Keeping up unnecessary mandates is not a cost-free political solution. You are teaching your population to distrust you. Yeah, we mean that quite literally: you, Liberals, are also responsible for the declining social cohesion and failing institutional trust that is fuelling populist movements across the country.
We realize that the mandates are small potatoes. But in a way, they’re also really not. Keeping up historic restrictions on Canadians movement, slowing a desperately desired return to normal, purely for political reasons, is only further corroding the social contract between electorate and government. Further, you’re falling into exactly the same trap as the Conservatives — you’re riding the dragon that will eat you, allowing your loudest, fringiest members to dictate policy.
The Liberals seem to be getting this, at least a little bit. Probably because they perceive the political threat this presents to them. On Friday, they announced that random COVID-19 testing of certain arrivals would be suspended, temporarily, until the end of the month. This is intended to reduce backlogs and crowding at our arrival gates, particularly in Toronto. We’ll see how much it helps, but as a political decision, it’s revealing: the Liberals are now alarmed enough to do something, but not to actually just scrap the screening, at least not yet. For now, it’s just a pause.
