LILLEY: Feds gives NHLers special treatment with COVID exemption

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When Eric Staal lands in Montreal on his flight from Buffalo, he won’t be spending any time in a Government of Canada approved hotel — nor will he need to spend a full 14 days in quarantine, just seven days for the NHLer.

The Public Health Agency of Canada has confirmed what several NHL sources have told the Sun previously, the quarantine forced on average Canadians doesn’t apply to NHL players.

I have nothing against the 36-year-old Thunder Bay native traded from the Sabres to the Canadiens on Friday. Nor do I begrudge him the ability to quarantine for seven days, pass some COVID tests and then be allowed to play. What I have a problem with is the ridiculous rules the Trudeau government imposes on the rest of us.

Any regular Canadian, not playing in the NHL, must go into a government-approved hotel for up to three days while awaiting the results of a COVID-19 test. We’ve heard all about the problems from bad food – or no food – to assaults by guards hired to keep people in their rooms.

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The situation is horrible and most likely unconstitutional in how it has been implemented.

Once you get a negative COVID test and pay your $2,000 hotel bill, then you can go home for the remainder of your 14-day quarantine. What you can’t do is report to work and start flying across Canada to play hockey.

“It’s elitist,” Conservative MP and health critic Michelle Rempel Garner said of the government’s decision.

“It undermines the credibility of the government’s program,” she said. “This is not a policy based on public health outcomes, it is based on arbitrary PR measures,”

Rempel Garner points to people who have to travel to visit sick or dying loved ones but are still forced to quarantine for 14 days, including three at a hotel. She also points out that returning snowbirds who have been fully vaccinated must still do the full 14 days, including the hotel stay, that Staal and other NHL players being traded will get to skip.

Staal won’t be the only player to get this treatment. With the NHL trade deadline coming up on April 12, we can expect many more to be in the same position. But family members hoping to visit for Easter or Passover will be out of luck — they’ll be stuck for 14 days.

This isn’t the first time the feds have allowed this happen. During the NHL’s training camps last year, players from out of the country reporting to Canadian team were told they could quarantine for seven days and, if they passed several COVID tests, would be free to leave quarantine.

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There was a pilot program in place in Alberta late last year that allowed average citizens to leave quarantine early after getting a negative test, adhering to certain conditions on where they could not go and obtaining further testing that also had to be negative. That pilot project was shut down when the Trudeau government brought in the hotel quarantine program.

If the Trudeau government, or any government, wants the public to buy into rules around things like quarantine or COVID restrictions, then the rules must be seen to be fair and evenly applied. In allowing this exemption, the Trudeau government is making a mockery of their own rules and saying that in Canada not everyone is treated the same.

If seven days quarantine with multiple negative COVID tests is good enough for NHL players, it should be good enough for the rest of us. Average Canadians should not be treated like second class citizens in their own country.

blilley@postmedia.com