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Letter from a Calgary Jail
The following is based on a letter I wrote a friend a few days ago while “quarantining” under mandatory federal government restrictions in Canada after returning home from the US. It has been briefly updated. For all the conversation about masks and vaccinations in the US, I thought a Canadian experience might add a bit of perspective. My apologies for the lengthy first post.
“Follow the science” is a poor misdirection in politics. It leads inevitably to simply finding a hypothesis among multiple rival hypotheses that best conforms to one’s political interest. That might be political science (really just an oxymoron), but it is not science. Such practice becomes both absurd and malign when through political pressure one actively cancels the communication of alternative interpretations and hypotheses or berates legitimate skepticism. Enforced conformity is the opposite of science and should find no support in a free society.
Coercively quarantining the healthy is one such absurdity. The Imperial College model was wrong on many accounts and admitted at the outset no understanding of how the virus was spread. Yet the direst warnings were embraced as science and the flawed assumptions, panic mongering and political exploitation that followed have dominated policy choices under the guise of following the science. Reasonable skepticism and alternative approaches were derided and mocked as anti-science. Two weeks to flatten the curve have thus crept ever forward to pass more than 60 weeks. Our borders have been locked down while mundane and inoffensive activities prohibited. So here we are, fifteen months in, following some version of science, continuing to live in some bizarro world divorced from reason and accountability. And we cultivate the delusion that this is somehow responsible government. Dissent and skepticism are shamed and sometimes criminalized, all under the guise of science, security and togetherness.
Last week I broke ranks from the herd and traveled to the US. Among the few unfortunate developments of my life is a wonderful daughter who fell in love with a southern climate and an American lad. One consequence this past year means her repeated efforts to visit home have been frustrated by the enduring hysteria of COVID. In hopes of expanding our father-daughter relationship beyond the limited confines of memory, letters and FaceTime, I made the journey south. It was my first flight since the pandemic began; I’ve been a relatively good citizen and have complied with pandemic protocols since they were introduced. I recognize and appreciate that the responsibilities and obligations we have as citizens extend to our communities. But the trip was overdue, and I aim to be a responsible father as well as a citizen. One shouldn’t have to choose between the two.
The airport in Calgary resembled a mausoleum: barren, silent, with only a few dozen people scattered throughout entire corridors and waiting halls. When I arrived in the US, however, airports were full and vibrant, even busier than in earlier, saner times. Caution was manifest, but clearly this was the land of the free and the home of the brave. Outside the airport, masks were optional and infrequent, restaurants were busy and there were no lineups to get into retail stores. Life seemed… I don’t know, …normal?
I felt like a political refugee, and was reminded of the Soviet fighter pilot who defected to the US in the 1970s. He could not comprehend a simple supermarket: too much food and no lineups. He was certain the store was fake, an effort of American propaganda to make him think the Western economic model was better than the planned failures of socialism. After more than a year of pandemic protocols and restricted living, normal now seemed surreal.
I had received the first of two vaccination shots in April after waiting patiently for many weeks. I was unable to get my second dose, however, as the Canadian demand for vaccinations far exceeds the supply. While in the US last week, I realized that I could receive my second vaccination only a few blocks away from my daughter’s home, free of charge and without an appointment. No line-up, no waiting. That I was Canadian only made the conversation with the care provider more interesting. There were more than a dozen pharmacies within an eight mile radius with abundant supply of my preferred vaccination. In contrast to this convenience, my dear wife, a dedicated health care worker charged to look after COVID patients in the hospital, has yet to receive her second inoculation. How utterly bizarre.
I boarded my flight to return home to Canada a few days ago. I had received my latest certificate that I am COVID free; my second such test within five days. Nonetheless, some bureaucratic schlemiels backed by politicians followed their science and came up with ridiculous and offensive hurdles to complicate my return. Getting into the United States was relatively simple, but getting back home was an ordeal. Let me repeat: getting into a foreign country was easier than returning home. I not only needed a new molecular COVID test, I also had to go on-line to a government website and click my way through seventeen pages of queries and attestations. My body temperature was tested prior to boarding, and then another molecular test on landing (my third in less than a week). Then I was forced to stay in a hotel (of my “choosing”!) and, only because the gods were in my favour, now face a form of house arrest for a fortnight, during which I am to be tested yet again. Even as the tests are negative, I am still under quarantine. In short, I will need to prove five times – four times through costly molecular testing – that I am not a diseased threat.
A threat to whom? I interact with nobody other than my wife and my dog. Our house is large enough that more than 100 people can safely practice social distancing. I share that tidbit without braggadocio and because the specifics of my residence are now of special interest to government officials, reflected in the forms I had to fill out to return to Canada. The risk I pose to the world quarantining in my own home, however, is a minuscule fraction of the risk of staying at an approved airport hotel. And yet there I was, incarcerated in a hotel room that I had found online for $81 per night and through the magnificence of government policy costing four times as much. Those added costs were ostensibly for the extra cleaning and scheduled meals and snacks, regardless of what one chose to eat. No sense complaining to the hotel staff: they were pleasant enough, faced disgruntled guests with regularity and readily admitted the regulations and procedures were all insane. As did the customs officials, airport personnel and the nurses at the COVID testing station at the airport. Just a quick comparison: hospital patients in Canada with COVID need but one negative test to have restrictions removed and be treated as any other patient.
I’m not complaining. Well, OK, I am. But not about the costs, which were considered in my own cost-benefit analysis in my decision to visit my daughter. I am glad I went. But it seems everyone situated on the ground, where the rubber hits the road, recognizes the insanity of these mindless regulations. I take a modest level of satisfaction that an “expert government panel” recently recommended that the government quash the mandatory hotel stay, as it is “expensive, inconsistent and full of loopholes.” I would feel more at ease if they also called it for what it is: incompetent policy created by incompetent people without regard for the liberty and individual rights of Canadians.
Many decades ago, I traveled to the Soviet Union. The bureaucratic nonsense that complicated travel before perestroika was far less onerous than this travesty. But there was an additional and fundamental difference. With a little congeniality and occasional grease, local Soviet officials were often willing to assist their comrades in avoiding the insanity. Here in the deferential Dominion, however, the courage and the culture required for such support among the enforcers are tellingly absent.
Lest a comparison with a communist regime seems beyond the pale, I would point out a few other similarities. First, the Soviet system was also plagued by veiled advantages for the select few. Party officials and others rarely had to live by the same rules as the masses. Our new regime likewise demonstrates a similar passion, and government officials are quick to exempt themselves from the vomitous nonsense they endorse for the simple folk. Second, I can’t help be reminded of the Chinese policy of billing families for the cost of the bullet used to execute political prisoners. Here we pay grossly inflated prices for our own hotel incarceration and COVID swabs.
Third, information regarding these regulations are in constant flux, as government concern focuses on finding and closing loopholes. The past week I received a bevy of well-intentioned suggestions from friends on how to avoid the process. Why not have someone drive me 1000 km north to the border and walk across? No hotel stay is necessary for those who do so. Or, just declare your rejection at the airport and refuse! Second and third-hand tales of people who ignored the onerous and arbitrary guidelines and got away with it, or (alternatively) of those who were fined for doing so spread like wildfire. Waiting to board the plane in Denver, I overheard countless conversations among Canadian passengers unsure what to expect. Of course, chronicling such conversations requires adverse selection, given that they were all souls in transit. The point is that no one considered the regulations legitimate, and the widening circulation of rumours, urban myths and conjecture reflect our government’s eroding reputation among the lives of the governed, not unlike my experiences in Soviet and post SovietRussia.
Lastly, and most importantly, there is something especially obtuse about hotel staff being drafted into the ranks of government informants. The staff are employed in the private sector, yet they are tasked to report back to the government regarding guest compliance with inane regulations while monitoring and enforcing the isolation of guests in the hotel. I was, quite literally, locked in my room. When I received the good news regarding my most recent Covid test, I was required to wait and then be escorted out of the hotel, and asked to prove my negative test to hotel staff. Clearly, I was not a guest. Even as the same staff openly admitted the ridiculousness of the regulations, they nevertheless served as surveilling agents of the government.
Such practices that blur the boundaries between private and public lives reflect a worrying drift towards a totalizing state. This is why the key concern for me is not found in the loony-ness of specific regulations, but in the principles that lie at the foundation of these policies. Quarantining the healthy is an absurdity, regardless of the intent. In many communities south of the border, life has already returned to a measure of normalcy. People are cautious, but they live without the level of coercion, bureaucratic nonsense, fear, and foot-dragging continuing to plague us here. The damage done will be hard to undo. The ways in which the state has expanded its reach and prerogative should cause us alarm. The principles of peace, order, and good government are not infinitely elastic and do not justify this lunacy. The whole concept of responsible government is broken and we, like sheep, bleat our assent.
The Polish dissident turned politician Adam Michnik once noted that it is a simple thing to turn an aquarium into fish soup. But how does one turn fish soup into an aquarium? Governments so eager to neutralize risk and keep us safe by “following the science” appear incapable of admitting the science they follow has been of their own choosing. Emerging and abundant evidence that whole communities can live well without relying on overbearing and restrictive protocols that violate basic rights and trespass reasonable limits on the role of government are received by our exempt elite with skepticism and scorn. That some of our public officials even attempt to direct scorn towards the US in order to justify the calamity they perpetuate indicate how challenging it will be to undo this mess.
From the perspective of my recent prison cell, the existing restrictions regarding re-entry in Canada have little to do with health and safety and far more to do with retribution against citizens exercising the audacity to travel. How dare they ignore the benevolent government’s concern for our well-being! The nerve of those who question the government! How dare they threaten the lives of others! None of this is following the science, but all of it is an abuse of authority, an abundance of arbitrariness and an acute absence of accountability.
Published in General
Amen, brother. Thanks for the post. It’s a great first post. Welcome.
I live quite near to the border. Just before the outbreak, my church hired a new minister who lives on the Canadian side of the border. We now have service with the minister projected on the screen through Zoom, since if she crossed the border to come to church, she would have to face what you faced.
Years ago we crossed the border without ID. And borders in Europe required passports. Now, much of Europe is borderless, and the Canada US border is almost always a challenge. It might be easier to enter from the South. Weird world.
You mean from Windsor? It’s probably easy enough, it’s going back south into Canada that is painful. 😆
Hail fellow well met!
Thanks to the folks in Ontario and Quebec the government that gave you this lunacy will win another five years.
Getting real tired of being nice.
Awesome first post, and welcome! It’s too bad that Canada is literally becoming a police state, in the name of “public health”. My term for the officials who are really running the government of my state (Washington) is Health Nazis. Their rule is nearly as bad as the real Nazis.
Just FYI, the US just passed a law waiving the Jones Act that prevents cruise-ships from traveling directly from Seattle to Alaska, so there will be a cruise season this year, albeit a shortened one. The Canadians, with their ridiculous “closing of the waters” to “foreign ships” are denying the country millions of dollars in tourist spending.
That is a great opening line and welcome to Ricochet. I also appreciated hearing America called the “land of the free” again because for much of the pandemic we’ve been complaining loudly that we no longer deserve that moniker. But it’s good to know that we still have some spark compared to Canada and Western Europe. Many of my European friends took delight early on in the pandemic pointing out how inept we seemed to be and mocking those of us who refused to be afraid, but I told them I suspected in the end, America would come out alright.
I guess we’re not quite “all in this together” after all. Only room for the likeminded.
Did we? My part of the country did alright, but I understand NYC is still locked down.
Some credit has to go to operation warp speed, I think, even as the derision still echoes. Lots of road ahead. But there is something to be said for as goes the US, so goes freedom for all.
We’re not at the end just yet. But I have friends who just came back from NYC and they were out to dinner every night and said Times Square was packed. My brother went to a concert in the city last week. So not nearly as locked down as it was.
Fantastic post! But it’s a shame you are so cavalier about the whole thing and don’t understand that the hotel staff is the front line of defense that keeps you from smuggling across the border the Katmandu Variant, then proceeding directly to the Home for the Aged and going room by room, exhaling aerosolized murder in their fearful faces.
You can’t talk about the Katmandu variant. That’s racist against the Katmandese. Katmandose? Katmandem? Well, it must be racist against somebody.
This is absolutely insane.
Words of wisdom . . .
I am a Canadian who spends the winter with her daughter in Mound, Minnesota. I was determined to follow this practice, one reason being that I only have a summer home in Canada. I am only allowed to stay 6 months per year so had to go back at the end of April to allow some room for next fall. My path home was difficult. It took a long time to figure out the best way. In the end I flew from Minneapolis (a very busy airport for pandemic times) to Grand Forks (there are three flights a day) and took a taxi to the border. I walked across dragging my one bag and had to stand at the car window. The process there was brief as I had filled out a special App for arriving Canadians which has all your documents and your quarantine plan. I also had my negative covid test (less than 72 hours old – that’s another story). I then went into a garage for another covid test and was given a kit to take home with me. My kids were waiting across the line with my car so I was able to drive to my rural home where I live alone -alone.
Over the next 14 days I had to fill out a daily questionnaire on line, answer a phone call every other day, do the at home covid test, which Purolater picked up and had 2 visits from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I ALSO HAD 2 PFIZER SHOTS.
I am not in quarantine anymore but Manitoba is so locked down I don’t really see anyone anyhow.
It’s hard to believe that the winters in Canada are so horrible that you think wintering in Minnesota is preferable.
I laughed at that, too. . .
But this rather explains it.
I get that all the time. A snow bird who likes the snow. I have a child with grandkids in Winnipeg and another in Mound so it seems a good solution.
I know of a number of people who are finding ways to walk across the border. Have heard that a shuttle service has opened up in Great Falls, Montana that shuttles Canadians to the border – dropping them off so they can hoof it across at the Sweetgrass/Coutts crossing. As in your situation, it requires a vehicle to be waiting for you on the other side. Those of us with families on both sides of the border seem to find ways to make it work.
You have a child with grandkids? You’re remarkably long-lived.
May 19-22 Mrs Dr Robert and I visited NYC. We celebrated my 65th birthday at Peter Luger’s restaurant, which was full; saw my son marry at Queens Botanical Garden; sat at his old restaurant for 4 hours and greeted his friends over beer; had a 14 course Chinese dinner; and attended a comedy club Friday night. Servers were masked. Customers were not, I did not put one on at all. The city is opening up.
Welcome!
There may have been a shortage of vaccine for a while, but there is no shortage of arbitrariness.
My solution is to leave the country. Thankfully grand ma March moved to Canada after Poland was re-founded. I am going for citizenship there as well as looking at moving overseas.
I am not paying 30 percent of my income for the ‘right’ to be imprisoned in my condo.
What gets me, is I personally know many of our tyrants. Doug Ford I am not surprised at but Jason Kenney. I hope I never cross his path again. I am likely to kick the crap out of both of them.
I’ll contribute $100 to your defense fund.