EDITORIAL: Canadians need to have a real summer

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The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) offered some grim predictions on Friday for how this coming summer could look for Canadians.

In fact, they’re hinting that we may not have a summer at all.

Their latest modelling says that a “high uptake of 1st vaccine dose will influence whether it will be safe to lift restrictive public health measures this summer.”

When it comes to the key metrics for when it’s safe to lift lockdowns across the country, they consider the “plausible safe lifting scenario” to be when at least 75% of adults have received their first dose of the vaccine.

Although they note that measures can be lifted when 20% of Canadians have received both full doses.

This is a rather disheartening situation. Canada’s vaccination rates are significantly lower than that of countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom.

According to the latest PHAC data, only 24% of Canadians have received their first dose and 2.5% have received two doses.

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Given that Canada is only a week away from the warmer days of May, this doesn’t bode well at all for people who were looking forward to, for example, seeing their kids finally enjoy a season of outdoor sports leagues or gather for BBQs with family and friends.

These are the sorts of things that were banned last year and stand to be off limits again this summer.

Canadians are not pleased at the prospects of this. They’re upset about the federal government’s inability to secure enough doses of vaccines and at the provinces for not rolling them out more effectively.

Then again, they would also be right to question the utility of a cancelled summer – to ask why and to even push back.

Last summer the virus significantly receded during warm weather. We also know now that outdoor transmission is an extremely rare phenomenon.

Is there any real scientific justification to saying no to summer for a second year in a row? It doesn’t seem to be the case.

The goalpost of a 75% vaccination also seems high, given that vaccines are rightly voluntary and, while we support vaccinations, Canada may never actually hit that rate.

No cancellations. Let’s make summer work. Canadians need it.