On Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that there was going to be an easing of travel restrictions on June 21 for Canadians who have fully complied with his demands for them to be vaccinated.
Canadians who have been unwilling or unable to get the scarce COVID-19 vaccines will be treated as second class citizens at the border.
This bodes well for some Canadians who have been lucky enough or willing to get the vaccine.
However, this policy change is hardly applicable for the vast majority of Canadians. According to Our World in Data, an online publication that has been tracking vaccinations globally, while 62% of Canadians have received their first vaccination, only 8% are fully vaccinated.
Of course, this means that over 90% of Canadians will still be forcibly quarantined in hotels, at their own expense, upon returning from the United States.
To put this in perspective, while only 63% of Americans have received their first dose, significantly more Americans have received two doses, with 41.9% being fully vaccinated.
This disparity can largely be explained by Trudeau’s vaccine procurement program and the resultant never ending delays in vaccine shipments, which have persisted to this day.
To address this problem, the federal government has taken the approach of mixing vaccines — in what some have called a “population-wide experiment.” And this approach includes the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is no longer used by several countries due to blood clotting that may result from taking it. In other words, anything is good enough for Canadians.
Regardless, the announcement of a conditional reopening is far from ideal, as a large portion of the population, especially young people who are statistically not at risk of dying from COVID-19, may never accept their vaccinations. And, as more data, anecdotes, and studies emerge documenting the adverse side effects of these experimental drugs, fewer people will likely want to receive their second dose.
Thus, it is unlikely that Canada will fully return to normal any time soon.
