The government of Quebec is taking a risky bet with the lives of its citizens, and potentially the lives of people elsewhere in the country.

Don’t take our word for it. “Risky bet” are the exact words that Quebec’s chief public health officer used to described the plan for reopening the economy and society outlined this week by Premier François Legault.

In the context of what the country has been through since the pandemic hit, this is truly remarkable.

For many weeks now, we’ve been told by politicians at all levels that we must follow the advice of the medical experts.

In fact, the politicians have effectively been hiding behind the recommendations of public health officials. We’re just doing what the experts tell us must be done to stop the spread of COVID-19, they have said over and over.

Canadians responded, overwhelmingly, by doing just that. We’ve stayed home, closed schools and businesses, put an end to almost all public life. Stopping the spread of this terrible disease became the national mission, and damn the cost.

Yet now here comes the second biggest province, the one that has been hit the hardest and continues to record hundreds of new cases every day, telling its people that it’s time to start resuming something closer to normal life.

Many retail outlets will be allowed to reopen starting Monday, May 4, with manufacturing and construction to start up a week later. The government estimates that 457,000 of the 1.2 million Quebecers who lost their jobs in the shutdown will be going back to work.

All this while Dr. Horacio Arruda, Quebec’s director of public health, calls the move a risky bet and adds rather lamely, “I hope not too many people will die.”

We should all wish Quebec luck and devoutly hope that its bet works out, that sending kids back to school and workers back to their offices and factories does not spark a resurgence in COVID-19.

If it works in Quebec, it will give the rest of us confidence that we can move in the same direction. It’s one thing for smaller provinces like Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and now Manitoba to start opening up. It’s quite another for a big province like Quebec, which has recorded by far the greatest number of deaths, to go the same route. That makes it an important experiment for the whole country.

It’s also noteworthy that Quebec makes no secret of the fact that its decision involves a trade-off: between lives lost to COVID-19 and the continued damaged to the collective health and wealth of society. As Arruda put it, given that the coronavirus cannot now be eradicated, “How do we balance everything — the economy, money, mental health? It isn’t just infectious diseases that are determinants of health.”

That’s essentially common sense, but while it looked as though the pandemic might spiral out of control and overwhelm the health system, the politicians insisted the only thing that mattered was following the experts’ advice on controlling it, regardless of cost.

Every day, however, brings fresh evidence that in the most-affected parts of Canada (Ontario and Quebec) the pandemic has hit hardest in long-term-care homes and other “congregate” settings (close to three-quarters of deaths have occurred there).

That lets Legault argue that outside those settings the pandemic is “under control” in Quebec, allowing him to ease restrictions so quickly. At the same time, it’s clear that he isn’t simply doing what his public health experts tell him to do to fight COVID-19; he’s taking that into account but he’s weighing it against the mounting costs, both financial and social, of closing an entire society.

It’s possible this may blow up in his face, that allowing elementary school pupils to return to class starting on May 11 may, for example, spread the virus to teachers and school staff. Or reopening stores and big manufacturing plants may set off a new chain of infection.

If that does happen, we will all be losers. More people will die, both in Quebec and possibly elsewhere as inter-provincial travel starts up again. Legault will be shown to have lost his “risky bet,” and will have to wear that heavy responsibility. Other governments will properly shy away from going down that path.

In the meantime, though, Quebec’s decision to move quickly puts pressure on others, especially the Ford government in Ontario, to move more quickly toward reopening than it might like.

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Premier Doug Ford ran into considerable criticism this week when he issued a “framework” for reopening that lacked any dates or details. He now promises to give businesses more specific guidance about what types of businesses might be permitted to open first, and under what conditions.

At the same time, though, Ford continues to hew to the line that he won’t approve any return until his public health experts flash the green light.

That’s a cautious approach that has served the province well until now. But given the pressure to start reopening, Ford may find himself calculating his own tradeoffs sooner than he would like. Ultimately, it’s the politicians, not the experts, who will decide when, and how, to ease us back toward normality.

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