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Rex Murphy: Leave it to Trudeau to find a way to make air travel worse than it already was Back to video

These mandates deny all who, for whatever reason, or set of reasons, are not vaccinated, the right and ability to fly within their own country. I see various estimates of how many they are, but the number is in the millions. That’s just a prefatory fact.

So what does going to any airport to travel within Canada look like? Obviously, you must grab your “papers.” You will also receive from one of the airlines any number of emails telling you how to “prepare” for going to the airport.

Normally, this process is so uncomplicated that most people are able to figure it out on their own. But with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s airport regime — for it is his government that has stubbornly kept these decrepit rules in place — the airlines feel  they have to provide a manual for the experience. It is very annoying and twice as officious.

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Once in an airport, you abandon the life you had before you entered. For example, in Toronto, you may now walk the streets, go into stores, participate in large gatherings — a baseball game, a Pierre Poilievre rally — without wearing a mask. You may sit with hundreds and even thousands without the cloth stigmata of the declining plague, breathe the same air as they and offer your own exhalations to the crowd around you.

However, in the airport, have that damn mask on or suddenly various marplots will grimly remind you that you must put your mask on or face some terrible retribution: Removal from the airport, denial of your flight — chased out of the concourse Tim Hortons under a hail of stale doughnuts.

So though you have been going about your business for weeks and weeks in Toronto without a mask, once you enter Pearson International Airport, you are back in pandemic central.

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Now, having passed the protected security people, you go to the gate. Then, given that your flight has been delayed — one of the rarest experiences Canadian travellers have ever faced in any airport — you sit with the 150 or 200 people you will be travelling with — unmasked, possibly for hours.

I speak from some experience on this. Once again, you share proximity with the unmasked, you are unmasked yourself, you take in air and exhale the carbon dioxide, as do all around you.

Finally, the call comes to board, and it’s mask time again. You and your fellow breathers apply the wretched air strainers and board the plane resembling nothing more than a group of amateur bank robbers who couldn’t afford balaclavas or even a good handkerchief before the hold-up.

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Are you getting the point? The point is that this extended Trudeau airport mandate is pointless. It is petty and mean and useless and annoying and an offence against the dignity of those who endure it.

Why is the government still clinging to these mandates? Why are the unvaccinated still forbidden to travel by air in their own country? Why are airport authorities themselves not condemning their singular obligation to enforce these useless and self-contradicting rules? How much damage are they doing to business and tourism?

For those who do it frequently, even before the pandemic, going to airports and flying in and out of Canada was one of the most miserable of modern experiences — summed up in the slogan so many passengers are familiar with: “We’re not happy, till you’re not happy.”

Singling out air travellers as the only people who these cursed mandates still apply to adds another layer of misery to something that is as far removed from joy as the mind allows and a mean government can supply.