I get how at first glance this looks unfair, and how you can feel upset about it. However, this seems to me to be a very short-sighted understanding of the real situation:
1) Our hospitals cannot currently handle any more patients. If alcohol is not easily available for alcoholics, they will either go into withdrawal - which can be life threatening and require hospitalization, OR, they will drink whatever they can find - again life-threatening and requiring hospitalization. From a system planning perspective, it makes all the sense in the world to keep alocholics and drug addicts safe. And by the way, those are peoples' children, parents, relatives, friends, spouses etc - and addictions are a disease that change the brain's chemistry and make it almost impossible to live without the substance - so don't tell me that alcoholics or drug addicts could choose not to put themselves in harm's way during a pandemic.
2) Often, when we talk of our immigration files (and ours has been lagging for 27 MONTHS) we are talking about activities on our files that are taking place in other countries. Everyone wants Canada to open up their embassies and VACs to full strength in those countries, so we can get our files processed. The sense of egotism in this sentiment is mind-boggling. Guess what?
- in the country where your file is being processed, they likely do not have a health system like we do (as ours is one of the best in the world). So, they may be really overwhelmed
- in the country where your file is being processed, there may be stay at home orders, or the transit system has stopped. Why? Because so many people are actually sick (Don't believe the numbers on the worldmeter - it's much worse than that) that they don't come to work, and the infrastructure suffers.
- in the country where your file is being processed, some of those local embassy officials and workers may have died, and hiring, training and replacing that knowledge is VERY difficult - especially during a pandemic.
- in the country where your file is being processed, they may have to do background checks from other countries, or other inland agencies that are just as affected by COVID as the embassy or VAC. So information takes longer to process and receive.
-in the country where your file is being processed, it is entirely possible that the scale of suffering and sickness is beyond your imagination - because health care there does NOT look like health care here. And at the end of the day, everyone working on our files loves their family and wants them to live, and wants to live themselves - as much as you do, so they may just be trying to live through this pandemic.
3. You may be someone who thinks that COVID isn't really that bad. You may think our hospitals and hospitals in other countries are exaggerating about the strain. And maybe you are young, so you don't think COVID will affect you. Fantastic. But if you break a leg that requires plastic surgery - you may not get that surgery and you will be disabled your entire life from your gimpy leg - because the ORs are filled with COVID patients OR for every 5 patients we get, it shuts down an entire OR because staff have to be redeployed. You may have a heart attach or a stroke, and not get the care you need because there are no health care workers left to treat you. They are all already busy, or sick. These issues are multiplied exponentially in a health care system that is not as good as ours. Countries need to take care of their own.
It is what it is. I am a systems thinker for my career (system health care planning, policy and implementation - senior level) - so I hope that this explanation sheds some perspective on it. Does it suck? Absolutely. I want to see my husband whom I haven't seen in a year. Our file was sent on October 4,2018 and arrived on October 12, 2018. We are losing years of our married life. But we are alive and healthy. I don't want any worker in a foreign country to die just because we demanded that they work on our files in an unsafe situation.
