For two weeks, we waited for the gang-flung police to arrive.
In mid-July, my wife and I went on vacation to a rustic cabin that her father built 65 years ago on a small lake north of Toronto.
Most Americans can’t Canada on those days. Due to the risk of coronavirus, both countries have closed their borders to non-essential traffic.
But my wife has U.S. and Canadian citizenship, so we were allowed in whenever we agreed to quarantine for 14 days.
Not a symbolic quarantine, wear a mask and keep your distance, but go in your company; a genuine one, does not venture beyond the cockpit and the dock. No races, no long walks, no visitors.
And don’t swim in the lake, a consultation I made to one of the public fitness staff who called almost every day to see us.
“I’m sorry, but no, ” he said. “It’s a public lake. Maybe you’ll meet someone there. And if you were in trouble, someone will catch you.
“I’m sorry, ” he added. He seemed to think so.
But it also reminded me that the Ontario Provincial Police can come in at any time to make sure that we do not violate regulations and that we can be fined from $206 to $1125.
I wasn’t kidding. In June, two Ontario men who raped their 40s after visiting Minnesota were fined approximately $850. Seven Americans who took an unauthorized walk in Banff National Park were fined approximately $900.
That’s one of the reasons Canada is doing it much bigger than us on this pandemic: Americans set strict regulations, and most of them obey them.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has established rules to help governors when it is safe to reopen their states to business. But President Donald Trump has suggested to governors to forget those rules, and many have, leading to COVID-19 outbreaks in more part of the country.
That didn’t happen in Canada. As in the United States, maximum aptitude decisions are made at the provincial level, not the federal government led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But Trudeau called for caution, not recklessness, and provincial leaders did the same, even those of the opposition Conservative Party.
As a result, the United States has experienced nearly twice as many COVID-19 deaths as Canada, consistent with the capita.
Canada’s reaction to the crisis has been perfect. Its two largest provinces, Quebec and Ontario, experienced severe outbreaks in April and May. A wave of infections has spread through the nursing homes, killing some 7,000 people, or about 80% of the country’s total.
Quebec, which allowed the bar to reopen in June, would possibly have acted a little earlier; the province experienced a mini-epidemic in July.
But elsewhere, reopening is more leisurely. Toronto, the largest city in the country, allowed bars and restaurants to resume service indoors, with plenty of space last week.
As a result, the spread of the epidemic has slowed. Canada reported 3,043 new cases last week; California, with a larger population, reported more than 55,000.
It’s hard to avoid giving credence to the elusive perception of a rural character: Canadians, unlike Americans, are proud to be a country that follows the rules.
Last month, when the majors asked the Trudeau government to repeal quarantine regulations to allow U.S. groups to enter Canada to play in opposition to the Toronto Blue Jays, the government refused and exiled the Blue Jays to play the season in the United States. It’s hard to believe an American politician is doing this to a local team.
“Americans celebrate independence, individualism, private freedom; many distrust the government (and) resent politicians,” wrote columnist Andrew Cohen in Ottawa Citizen. “Canadians settle for the wonderful government, that’s how we build the welfare state… We submit to authority.
Last week, Trudeau unveiled a government-sponsored smartphone app that will notify users if a user they have been in contact with performs COVID-19 tests. More than a million Canadians downloaded it in 3 days.
In the United States, the proposed use of touch search programs has led to a smooth debate about privacy violations. In Canada, the biggest controversy is that the app only works for other people with updated Apple or Android phones, so other low-income people and the elderly probably wouldn’t have to.
Canada has skeptics against the government, of course. Anti-mask crusaders organized small demonstrations in Toronto and Montreal. But they attracted only a handful of people, and they earned the audience from any wonderful politician.
From what we have seen, masking is almost universal in towns and small towns. And corporations are diligent in requiring consumers to disinfect their hands when they enter. I heard about this when I walked into a liquor store and forgot to disinfect; an older worker chased me down the aisle with a vaporizer in my hand.
Unfortunately, the pandemic police never showed up to inspect our 14-day quarantine. They relied on our sense of civic duty, and those threats of massive fines, to keep us online.
But that’s the point.
Canada did not want heroic or drastic measures beyond the initial blockade of the pandemic. All I wanted was a set of practical regulations and, above all, a consensus among political parties that regulations deserve to be respected.
This address also opens in the United States. It’s a shame we didn’t accept it.