To heal our pandemic divisions, amnesty should be granted to the unvaccinated
National Post, 29 May 2022
It’s time to stop punishing people with minority opinions on public health policy
It’s time for a pandemic amnesty: let people go back to their jobs.
With vaccine mandates lifted across the country — only the stubborn, ignore-the-science federal government is holding out — it’s time to stop punishing people with minority opinions on public health policy. Let them go back to work, let them visit their relatives, let them live as freely as people in Auckland and Amsterdam do.
Public health measures must be prophylactic and not punitive, aimed at preventing the spread of disease, not administering a penalty to those who do not comply with all the dictates.
I wrote that some seven months ago, in light of the federal government’s unreasonable vaccine mandate imposed on federal employees, which included dismissal for unvaccinated employees who work at home. Seven months on, the unreasonable has become the absurd, with an unvaccinated federal employee able to happily attend a hockey game in a packed arena full of screaming fans, but fired for working alone at home.
As each day passes, it becomes more clear that federal pandemic measures are punitive. Canada is one of the most vaccinated countries on earth. Thus it may be politically popular to administer harsh measures to the small minority of the unvaccinated, even if a year on from initial doses and post-Omicron, the effectiveness of vaccines to prevent infection and transmission is greatly diminished. Yet denying millions of Canadians the ability to travel in their own country, or to serve in the military, or to drive a truck across the border, is not something that mere political popularity makes legitimate.
Recent attention has focused on the only-in-Canada travel policies that are snarling our airports. The European Union dropped its mask mandate for flights almost two weeks ago; even New Zealand no longer has vaccine mandates for air travel, at home or abroad.
Eventually, Canada’s international travel restrictions will have to go, as travellers will begin to avoid Canadian carriers and perhaps even Canadian destinations. At the moment, it may be quicker to drive to Buffalo rather than wait in security lines in Toronto. The first impression foreign visitors get of Canada is being parked for hours on the tarmac awaiting needlessly burdensome customs lines to clear.
The vaccine mandate for domestic travel is now clearly unconstitutional, as it violates charter-guaranteed mobility rights without a proportionate reason. Emergency measures cannot outlast the emergency.
The primary toll of the pandemic was in death, illness and physical suffering. Pandemic restrictions were intended to reduce that, and they largely succeeded.
The restrictions brought their own heavy burdens: isolation from family and friends, permanent losses in education for schoolchildren, surgical delays for patients, significant — even catastrophic — losses for businesses and employees. Much of that cannot be undone, even though governments spent unprecedented amounts of money attempting to mitigate the economic pain.
That is the past. But there are hardships that endure. Why should they continue when the other pandemic measures have been lifted?
Consider the Canadian military, which is short thousands of troops due to the pandemic putting training on hold. Given the situation, does it make any sense to expunge already trained troops, some of them with years of experience, to enforce a vaccine mandate that has outlived its usefulness?
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