On Friday I taught a seminar to University of Ottawa law students about the International Health Regulations — the legally binding rules that govern how states must respond to pandemics and spreading infectious diseases. Little did I know that at the exact same time, just down the street, our federal government was flagrantly violating this international law by denying visas to people from Ebola-affected countries.

As I explained to my students, the International Health Regulations are pretty simple. They require its 196 state parties to maintain disease surveillance, to share information on public health events of international concern, and to support less wealthy countries to meet these obligations. They strictly prohibit restrictions on travel or trade unless based on scientific principles, risk to human health or a World Health Organization recommendation.

In this case, denying visas to people who have visited Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in the last three months is not science. My own research has shown that travel restrictions under these circumstances don’t work. There is also no evidence that West Africans pose a risk to Canadians’ health (especially if they’re currently living outside of their home countries). Consensus among public health officials is that pushing international travel underground and into illegal channels causes more harm than good. Finally, WHO has not recommended these restrictions — it strongly advocates against them — and slammed Australia when that country implemented restrictions just before Canada.

This means Canada’s latest move is patently illegal. That’s not good for a country that claims to be a good global citizen and champion of human rights and freedoms when they’re trampled in other countries.

But even more frightening is how this latest move is also dangerous.

First, in denying visas, Canada stigmatizes Africans, provokes retaliatory responses, disempowers the humanitarian response, and makes the contact-tracing work of public health professionals far more difficult.

Second, we undermine the global legal framework that 196 countries agreed would govern their pandemic responses and that Canada helped rewrite after it reeled from the travel advisory slapped against Toronto for SARS. If this Ebola outbreak teaches us anything, it is that health is global and that Canadians’ health depends on the co-operation of countries around the world. If countries know their citizens may face illegal and scientifically illogical travel restrictions, they are less likely to report the presence of disease outbreaks in the future.

To me, that’s what is scariest of all. This Ebola outbreak is far from the frightening scenarios depicted in films like Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion or novels like Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. Ebola’s mode of transmission means it will not spread very far in Western or wealthy countries. Any illegal action that Canada takes now during a relatively low-risk pandemic undermines responses to inevitable future pandemics — some of which will be far more virulent and deadly.

We desperately want countries to maintain disease surveillance and to share information on public health events of international concern. We blamed China for hiding SARS in 2002 only for fear of economic consequences — preventing international action and facilitating its spread to Canada in March 2003. But how can we chastise China for breaking the International Health Regulations — or other countries that similarly try to avoid travel restrictions in the future — now that we too are breaking the very same international law that we ourselves championed?

The hypocrisy is made even worse when we recall that it was Tony Clement, then-Ontario’s health minister, who led the charge against the SARS travel advisory. Clement is now a prominent federal cabinet minister and close confidant of our Prime Minister.

All of this highlights how fragile global governance really is. International laws should not be designed in such a way that a country as advanced, rich and globalized as Canada can so easily violate them with impunity.

But it also highlights how the effective functioning of our international system depends on each country following the rules — even when they’re not politically convenient — with knowledge that in the future each country will want others to follow rules when it’s not convenient for them.

This decision to deny visas to people from West Africa is a key moment in Canada’s international relations. It’s when our government led the way in making all of us less safe and more vulnerable to bacteria, viruses, parasites and fungi — our greatest threat to national and global security.

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As a Canadian, I am embarrassed. We all will be. Other countries will make sure of it. Let’s just hope they don’t also abandon the International Health Regulations as we did and stop informing us of future disease outbreaks.