It has been five years since a mystery virus escaped China’s borders and plunged the world into waves of rules mandating lockdowns, social distancing and mask-wearing. In Canada, one-third of people looking back on it all think those rules went too far — and they’re right to feel that way.
A new poll by Leger for the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS) has found that 36 per cent agree that “government’s reaction to the pandemic was exaggerated,” with men and people under 55 most likely to feel this way. Fifty per cent, on the other hand, think that government responses weren’t exaggerated.
As for the rest, ACS president Jack Jedwab told the Post, time may have dulled their perceptions: “Many people may have lost sight of how severe the pandemic was, and that’s probably an important contributing factor,” he said.
While those with regrets about the intensity of pandemic measures are in the minority, it’s a large minority. And considering the overwhelming public support that Canada’s pandemic restrictions had at their height in 2021 and 2022, today’s lack of support shows that a good many people have changed their minds.
Back in April 2020, support for social distancing laws was at 85 per cent, and for curfews, 76 per cent, per Ipsos. By August 2021, Ipsos found that 84 per cent of Canadians favoured mandatory vaccines for health care workers (and nearly that for teachers and public servants). Eighty-two per cent wanted planes and trains to require proof of vaccination before boarding. Vaccine passports — which kept unvaccinated people out of gyms, restaurants and other indoor spaces — had the lowest support at the time, at a still high 72 per cent.
Even by the spring of 2022, Angus Reid found that 73 per cent of Canadians still favoured masking rules, and another 64 per cent favoured vaccine passports. Nanos polling that year even showed that 60 per cent of Canadians supported or somewhat supported fining those who were not vaccinated.
Oftentimes, these polls don’t ask about opinions on the financial measures that were taken at the same time — and cost us dearly.
At the provincial level, some of the most impactful policies made during the pandemic years have now turned out to be ineffective. School closures in Canada — which lasted the longest in Ontario — are now thought to have had no impact on community spread (though other prevention measures within schools are thought to have helped). Now, student performance is down and school boards are counting more absences.
Vaccine requirements — imposed on the public via vaccine passports for indoor public spaces, and on federal and some provincial public service workers by mandates — aimed to increase vaccine uptake, and somewhat succeeded. These were constitutionally questionable measures, however, and they came at the cost of alienating parts of the population.
The jury on mask mandates, meanwhile, is still out. While Canadian sources often insist that masking worked, health officials in the United Kingdom found medical-grade masks to be ineffective in protecting the vulnerable and in reducing transmission in schools.
Some of the greatest pandemic policy blunders happened at the federal level, however. In their rush to procure protective equipment and medical gear, the feds doled out massive contracts to companies that sometimes had no experience doing that kind of work.
The very worst procurement failure was that of the clumsy ArriveCAN app, mandatory for inbound travel to Canada during much of the pandemic, which cost the government at least $54 million (its true cost can’t be determined due to poor record-keeping). Initially, the app was only supposed to cost $80,000. Auditor General Karen Hogan set herself to figure out how the project spun so far out of control in October, and her final report is anxiously awaited.
If the ArriveCAN mess is anything like that of COVID financial aid, she will have her hands full. Earlier this December, Hogan released a scathing report that found $3.5 billion in business loans had gone to ineligible recipients. As for personal relief funding, the feds sent $9 million to people who had died before the pandemic. Many oversights were made.
Canadians would be justified in feeling outrage at how little thought was put into spending their money during those years — and they wouldn’t be alone. Even Bill Morneau, the Trudeau government’s former finance minister, has said that politics were put before policy when it came to finance during the early pandemic.
What’s missing now is synthesis. Canada has had no comprehensive review into the measures that were taken during COVID. The record of errors is a decentralized one: bits and pieces of public polling tracked sentiments over the years, and a mix of reporting, parliamentary investigation and government audits have revealed atrocious work on the end of finance.
Tying it all together should be a public inquiry. If a substantial chunk of the Canadian population believes the government overreacted, they should be heard out.
The vast majority of people just want to move on with their lives and are done thinking about the pandemic. But the many extreme and expensive policy choices, increasingly remembered with regret by the general population, can’t go without closure. Sober, unpanicked minds are needed to take a serious look at the choices that were made. Canada’s financial and public-health missteps of the pandemic years must never taken again.
National Post