Barbarians At The Gate

My preoccupation of late has been with those who refuse to get vaccinated, people who blithely and recklessly pose a hazard to all of us. Not surprisingly, much of that ilk is also adamantly opposed to vaccine certificates/passports. And for some reason beyond my ability to fathom, their voices have been heard over those of sane people.

This, and a conversation I had yesterday, has led me to wonder about the documentation that will be required when Americans begin crossing into Canada on August 9.  It is a date we should look upon with some trepidation.

Yesterday I walked over to a local store to buy some milk. En route, I ran into the manager of the garage where I take my car for servicing. As we chatted about Covid and related matters, he told me something one of his customers had relayed to him. Said customer has a cousin from the U.S. planning a visit. The cousin, an avid and rabid anti-vaxxer, said he has bought fake vaccination certificates online (most likely on the Dark Web, where they are readily available) for $75 each. Said customer told his cousin that he wouldn't be letting him into his house.

So the question is, what precautions are the Canadian government and Canadian Border Services taking to detect counterfeit certificates? Sadly, the answer is not especially encouraging.

Relying on questioning and 'intelligence' to ferret out the fakes leaves too much to chance. In its zeal to welcome back Americans, the federal government seems willing to put some of the gains we have made in our Covid battle at risk. I doubt the electorate would cheer such recklessness.

He Speaks For The Majority, I Suspect

That would be The Star's Patrick Corrigan:


Meanwhile The Star's editorial board offers some insights into why Canada has fared so, so much better in dealing with Covid-19 than the United States:

It’s a terrible thing for an old, dear friend to watch America — as a result of its wilful blindness, contempt for science and gross mishandling of the pandemic — descend to the status of a pariah state.

The Atlantic’s George Packer described in one searing paragraph recently just how pitiful the former promised land of the planet had become.

“When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills — a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public — had gone untreated for years.”

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational and collective, Packer said.

Instead, it got Donald Trump’s singular ignorance, delusion and pathological instinct to see everything, even matters of life and death, in political terms.

Canada is an entirely different story for a number of reasons:

Part values, part experience, part humility of people and their leadership, part consistency of government messaging.

At core, our national DNA favours the collective during a crisis that has demanded collective action, mutual sacrifice, looking out for the other rather than insistence on personal liberty and pursuit of happiness.

Many of the characteristics frequently cited as negatives in comparing Canada to the U.S. — our smaller size, our humility, our greater trust in government, our commitment to community and social services, no sense of our own mythic exceptionalism — have become assets in this crisis.

We have also shown ourselves capable of learning some hard lessons:

After SARS, Canada redesigned the federal-provincial relationship on public health and infectious diseases. Our public systems are more amenable to coherent reaction to widespread crisis than the private institutions in the U.S.

As well, not having the same level of poisonous political partisanship as does the U.S. also helped:

In Canada, unlike the United States, the partisan cudgels were put aside — mercifully avoiding the vexation of states forced to deal with what Washington wouldn’t, and governors putting political affiliation and loyalty to the president ahead of science and medical expertise.

As recent events have demonstrated, our leadership is far from perfect. But compared to the Americans, we do have things to be proud of as this first wave of Covid-19 wanes.

And, of course, we must keep that border closed for the foreseeable future.