Of course, we heard from the Public Health Agency of Canada about a year ago to avoid all unnecessary travel. It does not get clearer than that. Avoid all unnecessary travel. It's about as obvious as it gets, yet people still chose to travel.
Certainly the variants of concern got in, and certainly they did escape the measures that were taken in place. I still firmly believe that the 14-day quarantine period cushioned us significantly from importing these. We really did get very good—of course not perfect—protection with that policy.
Of course, in the context of an unknown threat, which are the variants of concern.... I can't look anyone in the eye and tell them with a straight face even now exactly what they mean. We're still learning a lot about them. It's important to proceed with the precautionary principle, meaning take it seriously because we don't know how deadly or not these could be. We may as well play it safe. That, of course, means being able to rapidly adapt your policy to an emerging global health threat.
You certainly need that capacity to be swift and nimble to stay two steps ahead of the virus, because we've already seen what happens when you don't.