This is yet another example of Really Bad Journalism - in my view. (Why is it always the post and its brethren? Politics?)
They completely miss the point and never ask the question (or ignore it) one of the very first things one learns in public policy/statistics and related: what is the denominator? (Are we comparing like to like?)
One-third sounds like a big number (as does the number in the article, 88,000). But the comparison really has to be made against something else - in this case, for example, how many travellers were arriving before these measures were brought in, and over what period of time. (This is not a perfect comparison either, it's actually much more complex)
The figure I remember for Pearson Airport alone pre-covid was 100,000 arrivals per day. If that 88k arrivals not going into hotel quarantine is over three months ... well you can see the point. (Proper comparison would be during covid but before the hotel policy, I'm just trying to give a sense of scale).
I don't mind them questioning and raising the point - and it is a serious gap that PHAC doesn't give some breakdown or info. But the one-third itself doesn't mean much of anything.
If you wanted to guess at how many infectious people being let in, okay, let's take 1-2% infection rate - 2% probably at high end - that would be ~1500 infectious cases. Over two-three months, it's not nothing, but it's actually quite a small number compared to eg Ontario with 2-3000 cases a day.
(There are a whole lot of other questions that PHAC could clarify that are REALLY relevant - for example, if a lot of this is air crews, government, military, and a few other categories - are they ALREADY doing some kind of quarantine regime i.e. outside of the hotel policy? Do those other categories also have some enhanced testing regime? Contact tracing? etc. 1500 more infectious cases might seem like a lot, but if they are already and were before doing more serious isolaiton than the hotel requirement, it might mean a much lower prob of transmission to the community, which is what we should be worried about.
Unfortunately PHAC's lack of actual figures leaves it to the Post to write more fear-mongering articles that fail to even ask the question "what's the denominator, Kenneth?*")
*Apologies for the obscure REM reference.