Screw the travel advisory, I’m headed for the border

I can’t think of a better way to respond to the federal government’s latest nonsensical, unscientific, delusional admonition of travel than with a completely non-essential trip across the border. This isn’t just my contrarian spirit taking hold as I planned to head stateside for a few days anyway, but I’m more eager to do so now that the Liberal government has wagged its (middle?) finger in the general direction of Canadians, telling us to stay home for the holidays.

I might need to send Justin Trudeau a postcard when I get to my destination.

“Now is not the time,” health minister Jean-Yves Duclos said of travel yesterday.

For almost two years now, we have been told it’s “not the time” to live our lives, that we’re almost back to normal – but not yet. By now, even the most hopeful Canadians have realized that our promised freedom is but a mirage which vanishes as we near it.

Don’t let that depress you too much. The sooner people realize how little the government knows what it’s doing, the sooner they can reclaim their lives.

I’m taking a break from my usual pessimism in noting that something seems to have changed in the last week. This shift goes beyond mere exasperation. I’ve encountered people on the political left and right – and the completely apolitical – whose tolerance for the omicron panic is non-existent. People who have dutifully gone along with the lockdowns, restrictions, vaccination drives and “we’re all in this together” chants are finally saying “screw this.”

Except for a couple of friends of friends of friends, no one I know is cancelling their holiday plans. This appears to be the right course of action with all available evidence pointing to omicron symptoms as being as mild as (or even milder than) a cold, despite a higher rate of infectiousness.

Nevertheless, the merchants of doom are telling us to panic. These are the people who derive great purpose from envisioning worst case scenarios that don’t materialize, only to later rationalize their wrongness as mere caution.

Toronto Star columnist Bruce Arthur is predicting omicron will unleash “chaos.” He doesn’t quite get to “bodies falling from the sky,” but he might as well.

This morning, Ontario science table co-chair Adalsteinn Brown called for more restrictions as we stare down what he is already declaring the “hardest wave of the pandemic.”

Fortunately for Ontarians, the science table is down there with divining rods and healing crystals as far as its reliability is concerned. Only a handful of people in Ontario are buying what the science table is selling. Unfortunately, those people work for the Ontario government.

While the federal advisory against “non-essential” travel is literally a suggestion, one shouldn’t take from this that the government has abandoned coercion as a tactic. Several media reports suggest Trudeau and company were prepared to reinstitute mandatory quarantine and other border measures before they got significant pushback from a few provincial premiers.

We know nothing is ever off the table (see: vaccine passports, border closures, workplace vaccine mandates, etc.) so the absence of more severe restrictions now does not mean they might not be weeks or even days away. I have no doubt that Canadians will, in the coming weeks, be further restricted from living our lives, despite the relative safety with which we can do so.

If we don’t reclaim the old normal now, when will we?

Mass vaccination was supposed to be the trump card, yet campuses with near-100 per cent vaccination rates are cancelling exams and delaying returns to the classroom. The government imposed a vaccine mandate for air travel to keep the skies safe, and is now advising against travel altogether. Fully vaccinated Canadians who were told two doses of Pfizer or Moderna were the price for reengaging with civil society are now scrambling for booster shots, which will almost certainly be required in the new year to go to a restaurant or get on a plane.

We appear to have reached the saturation point for vaccination (short of an Austria-style population-wide vaccine mandate, anyway) and are facing a variant that appears to cause inconvenience more than illness. It’s not going to get better than this unless we commit ourselves to house arrest until we hit Covid-Zero.

The question now is who gets to decide when the pandemic is over. If we wait for the World Health Organization or some level of government, it won’t be.

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