March 9th, 2021 - Alex Usher
Some of you doubted me – a few of you quite vocally - when I suggested campuses would be able to open in-person for Fall 2021. Now, it should be clear that with more vaccines being approved, accelerated deliveries of already-approved vaccines and the decision to permit up to four months between jabs, that pretty much anyone in the country who wants one will receive the first dose of the vaccine by June and most will have a second before the end of August. There is absolutely no reason that campuses should not be open in such circumstances.

To be clear: COVID will not disappear in September. It’s probably with us forever. It’s going to be like measles – sometimes serious though not fatal but at the same time rare and difficult to spread precisely because so many people will be vaccinated. But we don’t keep universities and colleges closed because of measles, and equally we won’t be keeping universities and colleges closed because of COVID. This is clear. But the kind of fall semester we will have remains to be decided. It depends crucially on two things: distance rules and travel/visa processing. And the problem for planners is not only are these factors uncertain, it’s not clear that anyone in power is really grappling with these things.
Let’s start with the social distancing issue. Now, we’re all still at the golden two-metre rule. At that standard, very few in-person classes are possible. The question for back-to-campus planning is really: when does this change? One would think that once we started to approach herd immunity, those kinds of rules will disappear, but the timing matters. Will it be when everyone has had one shot, or when everyone has had two? If the latter, we might not quite have the go-ahead for everything in-person by Labour Day. Would the percentage of individuals choosing not to be vaccinated affect a decision? And to what extent will the insistence on hygiene theatre continue even after vaccinations are mostly done? 

If these issues are not clarified by May or so, it becomes very hard to actually schedule classrooms. Even by May, the final date when everyone will be fully immunized may not be clear. But what post-secondary institutions need to be pressing health authorities on right now is: what will the standards be for lifting social distance restrictions? Will it be when caseloads fall to X? When Y% of the population is vaccinated? When RO falls below Z? We need to know.

The second issue is travel and visa restrictions. Some people like to make a big deal about the fact that Canada never closed its borders to students during the pandemic, and this is true provided your visa was dated before March 2020. We then basically stopped processing new visas for six months. This didn’t matter so much as long as all teaching was remote, because students didn’t need to enter the country in order to attend. But if we go back face-to-face, we aren’t going to keep running parallel courses for students outside the country: for universities and colleges to keep enrolling these students, they are going to need to get students physically into the country. And the problem is that the back-up time on visa processing is mind-bogglingly long. Here’s the visa processing wait-time notice on the Immigration and Citizenship website for students from China (our #2 market for international students):
India is only 11 weeks at the moment, but that’s bad enough. Right now, this is probably the biggest financial threat looming for fall term. This backlog needs to get fixed very quickly. If it means universities and colleges finding a way to pay the Government of Canada to add processing staff, they should do it.

There are a bunch of other questions around travel to Canada that will need to be worked out as/if/when borders open. What will quarantine requirements be like? Will we even admit people without vaccinations? What about vaccinations not approved by Health Canada, like Sputnik and Sinovac? None of these are insurmountable problems: there’s nothing stopping Canadian universities from setting up their own air charter and quarantine facilities. Hell, they could probably arrange vaccinations for anyone without one in the departure lounge of the airport or on the plane itself. It’s all do-able, but it requires more clarity about what late August is going to look like.

This obviously isn’t stuff that institutions can decide on their own, but they can demand that various levels of authority start paying attention to these issues and let them know what the deadlines are for providing answers that provide a basis for action. My guess is we’ve got about eight weeks on social distancing and travel and considerably less than that on visa processing. Time to get busy.