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Ah, this requires a bit of knowledge of Quebec politics. The quebec premier is a pro-business populist. So, his leadership method can be accurately summarized as, doing what's best for business, and covering up for the issue this causes using populist issues (law 21, for example) or aesthetics. Well, as cases started increasing in Montréal, he wanted to act though. But he didn't want to implement an actual lockdown, as that would hurt the economy (much like fumbled the first lockdown where cases almost went to zero, but instead of continuing slightly longer and implementing mass tests and tracing, he lifted it right before tracing was up to capacity and cases went to zero, but I digress). For the same reason, he didn't want to close down schools, which are a large driver of infection here according to public health data. So, he implemented somthing he knew would look though to his base outside of Montreal, without actually impacting the economy, which is an 8pm curfew. Obviously, everyone with a bit of knowledge knew this would be useless, but there goes. As the curfew went on, vaccination of the health sector picked up, and the healthcare system went from a large driver of cases to non-existent, allowing Montreal to bring R under 1 and cases to go down. He obviously acted as if the curfew contributed, and pushed the curfew to 9:30. Then, he had the brilliant idea of : putting back schools to full-time learning instead of one-day-on, one-day-off, even as the schoolboards and teachers didn't want to - supercharching a large infection driver, but also, outside of Montreal, opening back up indoors dining for restaurants and indoors gyms (without masks!). Unsurprisingly, this led to an explosion of cases outside of Montreal, while Montreal kept stable amounts of infections despite a delayed curfew and full classrooms. So, he rolled back those measures, and to look though again, he put an 8pm curfew in the high infection periods. Despite the fact that cases weren't increasing much in Montréal, afraid that the lack of increase despite a delayed curfew would show plainly that his curfew, flagship measure, was useless, he put it back to 8pm in Montréal. Nicely, this means that people now only have two hours or so to do their groceries, supercharging the mass of people there, indoors. So there it is, it's really just aesthetics. If it helps or not doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't annoy his base too much and looks flashy, it's good for Mr. Legeault. Also, he added a mandate to wear masks in outdoor parks, while almost no infections at all were recorded outdoors. |
Your statement about the failure curfew policy and closures is definitely not true.
Have a look at the data [1] (Select: Quebec and change the timeframe to include 'all time'.
The original closures in January had a radically positive effect in reducing spread, and there were many more measures in place than merely curfew.
You directly contradict yourself by indicating 'opening up restos schools was a bad decision' when in the preceding statement you literally said that the policies 'had no effect'. They clearly did.
Schools have been opened in many places in the world, and are generally not considered to be superspreading locations - the difference 'now' is not COVID v1, rather, it's COVID v1.1 and v1.2 (i.e. other variants) which seem to be affecting young people at considerably higher rates.
The policy here is not hugely different than most places in the world.
[1] https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/coronavirustracker/