FIRST READING: Ottawa knows its border restrictions don’t make any sense
Canadian immigration to surge higher than ever before
First Reading is a daily newsletter keeping you posted on the travails of Canadian politicos, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent direct to your inbox every Monday to Thursday at 6 p.m. ET (and 9 a.m. on Sundays), sign up here.
The Canadian Army has been deployed to Abbotsford, B.C., in a desperate bid to shore up enough earth to stop the city from reverting to a lake . As previously mentioned in First Reading, much of Abbotsford is built within the footprint of Sumas Lake, a body of water drained in the 1920s to make way for farmland. After last week’s heavy rains ruptured the usual system of dikes and pumps that keep floodwaters at bay, that lake risks reconstituting itself. The army’s task is to build a new two-kilometre-long dike that would unfortunately condemn more than a dozen homes and businesses to stay permanently underwater. “This has to be done,” Abbotsford Mayor Henry Braun said last week .
Meanwhile , there are people who have been warning for years that this exact disaster would strike Abbotsford if the city didn’t shore up its dikes . A 2015 study commissioned by the B.C. government found that an incredible 71 per cent of the dikes holding back the return of Sumas Lake were vulnerable to failure by “overtopping” – the precise phenomenon that caused the city’s current crisis.
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While announcing a loosening of COVID-19 test requirements at the border, Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam appeared to admit Friday that the whole thing doesn’t make any scientific sense . Canadians who travel abroad are still required to provide evidence of a negative PCR test even if they’re fully vaccinated. Starting this week, the PCR test requirement is waived for Canadians who return home within 72 hours. But the 72-hour amnesty oddly does not apply to foreign nationals living in Canada. When pressed on how Canadians could apparently avoid contracting COVID-19 on weekend getaways to the U.S. but foreigners couldn’t, Tam replied, “ So I think, um, some of it is not as much the science as it is the operational consideration .” Chris Selley has a full rundown of the press conference here , as well as his considered opinion that “public health officials still take Canadians for idiots.”
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As B.C. still reeled from flood damage on Thursday, a massive RCMP operation was dispatched into the province’s interior to break up a series of illegal blockades that had stranded as many as 500 workers at Coastal GasLink camps near Houston, B.C. According to images provided by Coastal GasLink, activists had allegedly cut off the camps by felling trees and hijacking heavy equipment in order to destroy routes into the area. While the blockades were supported by a breakaway faction of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, they were strongly opposed by the nation’s elected leadership. In a lengthy official statement, the Wet’suwet’en First Nation said blockaders “cannot claim to represent us or any other members of the First Nation” and that they feared for the safety of Wet’suwet’en members who were among the workers trapped by the blockades .
