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But federal jurisdiction is no excuse for airports not to be delivering provincial and local advice. That’s a very basic planning failure, and should easily have been fixable on the fly. There is no excuse whatsoever, meanwhile, for Canada Border Services Agency to have been operating at anything other than above-maximum staffing.

It is unclear what we should make of this about-face

The Trudeau government’s credibility on this file bottomed out Sunday night with a shambolic press scrum on Parliament Hill that saw the wrong ministers — among them David Lametti (Justice) and Mélanie Joly (Economic Development and Official Languages) — trying to answer for these failings. They didn’t half manage it. All they managed was to promise reporters some kind of very significant announcement the next day, which is the sort of thing that might send a population more used to crises into genuine panic.

Things had vastly improved by Monday afternoon, when the right ministers — among them Blair, Patty Hajdu (Health), Marc Garneau (Transport) and Chrystia Freeland (Intergovernmental Affairs, Deputy PM, chair of the special COVID-19 Cabinet committee) — put on a reasonably professional performance explaining and defending that significant announcement: most notably, closing Canadian borders to foreigners.

That performance had two very serious flaws, however. One is that Hajdu had last been seen Friday dismissing the notion of closing borders. “Canadians think that we can stop this at the border, but what we see is a global pandemic meaning that border measures are actually highly ineffective and in some cases can create harm,” she said. That opinion is widely held among experts in various fields, to whom we are assured the government has always been and is still in thrall. It is unclear what we should make of this about-face. If this is a good idea now, it’s impossible to think it wasn’t one last week.