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Originally Posted by IanWatson
It sounds like those things (minus travel to anywhere but PEI and NB) will be happening relatively soon, with continued controls to minimize risks of transmission.
I've come around to the idea that opening needs to be very slow, because I think the reality is that it will be absolutely impossible to clamp down again. Yes, people are restless now, but can you imagine what it would be like if you told everyone they could go to the beach, and then two weeks later took that privilege away again? And yes restaurants and other businesses are teetering, but you'd guarantee their destruction if you allowed them to open, restock their refrigerators, rehire staff, invest money in new layouts to meet social distancing, and then shut them down again when cases relapsed.
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Yes, that is certainly something to consider on the question of reopening things. Especially since Strang has a track record of doing just that in the now-somewhat distant past. In the 1990s bars and restaurants went to great expense in many cases to construct sealed-off and distinct smoking areas within their facilities as a result of restrictions on indoor smoking that were imposed, only to have Strang render those expenditures useless a short time later with an outright province-wide ban. More recently he convinced his political bosses to enact extreme restrictions on vaping in this province based upon some very dubious "evidence", which will result in many local small businesses in that sector shutting down. He has certainly been no friend to many in the provincial economy, so I can see your scenario coming to pass here.