Prime Minister Justin Trudeau talks to Vancouver residents about his handling of vaccine warrants and the Ottawa truck convoy protests on May 24. JESSE WINTER / Reuters
If politics is a reason to do something in Ottawa, then the absence of politics is a reason to do nothing.
So when Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberals got to a point where it made sense to end federal air and rail vaccine mandates, they did nothing, because they didn’t feel a political imperative to push them in that direction. .
The political inertia within the seven-year government of Mr. Trudeau is so heavy that the prime minister and the people around him don’t even seem to feel the push of his own party’s deputies, the people in contact with the voters, who are telling them it’s time for these mandates to go away.
A Liberal MP, Joël Lightbound, voted two weeks ago in favor of a Conservative motion calling for the abandonment of all pandemic rules. Another, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, said in a tweet that while he did not agree with the whole motion, he believes that “a two-dose vaccine warrant without housing is no longer justified.” Others, such as New Brunswick MP Wayne Long, have publicly called for travel mandates to be lifted. There are more Liberal MPs who feel that way.
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A year ago, there was a compelling reason for vaccine warrants. Two shots slowed the spread of COVID-19 and reduced serious illness, easing the burden on hospitals and other exaggerated health centers.
But it was politics that consolidated the vaccines under the Liberal government brand. Mr. Trudeau harshly criticized the need for mandates in the 2021 election campaign, saying he would do whatever it took to overcome the pandemic. He argued Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives were too attached to anti-Vassers to take action.
Now that the benefits of these vaccine warrants have been reduced, there is no justification for banning people without domestic accommodation from traveling. But it seems that the Liberal government still feels tied to the simple political formula that helped win the election – that the mandates are good – even though the facts have changed.
They have changed because the two-dose vaccination required by the mandates – without reinforcements – is less effective than before. They have changed because of the Omicron variant, which infected many who had been vaccinated. They have changed because health care networks are less overcrowded than in previous pandemic peaks. And they have changed because provincial vaccine mandates have been abolished in most places. Vaccinated and unvaccinated are widely mixed in Canadian society, which means that travel restrictions have fewer effects.
Of course, vaccine mandates could still have a positive effect by encouraging a few more people to receive life-saving vaccinations. But this smaller potential benefit cannot be used indefinitely as an excuse to ban people from traveling to a country like Canada.
If Mr. Trudeau’s government wants to argue that some mandates are still justified, it’s time to do it in detail. But for the mandates to remain useful, the government should start requiring drivers to keep up with science. And after all this time some way should be found to accommodate unvaccinated travelers, such as letting them fly if they have negative quick tests.
So why has the Liberal government done nothing about vaccine mandates?
You could attribute part of that to the bureaucratic inertia pattern of federal pandemic measures. The government has been slow to reopen Canada’s borders to fully vaccinated people, slow to reopen government offices to the public and slow to ease controls and forms that add to delays at crowded airports.
When unprecedented emergency measures were imposed, no one developed a set of metrics for when these measures should be abandoned. They are now being reevaluated at the pace of Ottawa.
But to all this is added the political inertia within the government of Mr. Trudeau. Without a political impetus to do something, the default is to do nothing. The Liberals argued that vaccine warrants were needed, and some Liberal supporters are in no hurry to remove them. The government of Mr. Trudeau seems to see the fall of the measures as the conservative position.
So now the two biggest political parties are like broken watches that go well twice a day. Conservatives were against vaccine mandates even when they made sense, and liberals are in favor of them even when they don’t.
That doesn’t make sense as a policy. And Liberal MPs tell Mr. Trudeau that makes no sense politically either. The strategists of Mr. Trudeau might think that public opinion is not prepared for this, but the public statements of the Liberal parliamentarians are a warning that politics is changing rapidly and that he is already behind.
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