A new poll says a staggering 81% of Canadians want to keep the Canada-US border closure renewed at the end of the month.
I can’t imagine why.

We Canadians have flattened the COVID-19 curve, while infections south of the border are skyrocketing. This CNN report explains some of the reasons why:
Until the Americans get their act together, I agree wholeheartedly that the border should remain restricted to entry. That said, I’m detecting a hint of moral panic in the air about Americans who have entered the country.
On social media I’m seeing people call for locking down the border entirely, reporting American licence plates to the police, and many, many variations on an apocryphal story about American tourists visiting a restaurant and gloating to their waitress about how easy it was to lie their way across the border. Some drivers with American (or even out-of-province) licence plates are being harassed.
To be sure, here in Atlantic Canada, a small resurgence of cases have been linked to an American visitor who didn’t self-isolate. Some travelers from Minnesota to Ontario have been charged for not following quarantine rules. Needless to say, anyone coming here who doesn’t follow our rules should be punished for it.
But if there’s a massive surge of Americans coming here and blatantly flouting our rules, it isn’t yet reflected in our case numbers. Maybe next week will be different and we’ll start seeing COVID-19 cases in Canada take off, but so far it looks like most Americans coming here have been following the rules. Or, there just aren’t nearly as many coming here as social media would have you believe.
Part of the reason cases have exploded in Florida is because of complacency. The virus initially didn’t hit the state as hard as people expected, so Floridians let their guard down. (See this blog post, which aged like fine milk. If our cases do skyrocket in the coming months, and the outbreak is linked to Americans, we’ll know for sure that the Damian Penny curse is very real.)
I’m concerned that the same thing is happening here in Nova Scotia. Whenever I go out to stores or the gym, hardly anyone is wearing a mask. If you’re really worried about a new outbreak, covering your face is much more effective than looking for foreign licence plates.