New documents reveal that Canadians were forcibly confined in quarantine hotels with active outbreaks, and Public Health officials knew all about it.

If you came back to Canada during the COVID era, there's a good chance you were herded off a plane and shoved into a government-approved quarantine hotel under threat of fines or arrest. The justification? Safety. Public health. Science.

But newly proactively released government documents show the opposite was true: these facilities weren't safe. In fact, healthy travellers were getting infected during their forced stays. And the federal government knew it was happening.

According to internal documents from the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), staff were fully aware of what was going on.

From page 52 of the records:

"There have been several complaints... from travellers claiming that they believed that they contracted COVID from their stay at a GAA hotel."

Let that sink in: Canadians flew home healthy, were locked up by the government in the name of "stopping the spread," and ended up catching the very virus they were supposedly being protected from.

Known outbreaks. No action.

You'd think discovering outbreaks among hotel staff would prompt emergency measures. Instead, PHAC officials opted to keep travellers right where they were — in the outbreak zone.

Page 57:

"I would not move travellers to another location if they have been exposed — we risk outbreaks in another hotel."

That wasn't a health policy. That was hostage logic. And it shows that the government knew the pandemic was not as deadly and dangerous as they fearmongered it to be.

At the Hampton Inn in Mississauga, 10 staff members tested positive for COVID-19 (page 23). Was there an immediate response? Nope. In fact, PHAC wasn't even aware of the outbreak until someone emailed them about it (page 22). 

That's right — the federal agency managing the national health response for their so-called deadly pandemic had to be tipped off to an outbreak at one of its quarantine sites.

One Government Approved Accommodation (GAA) hotel had 30 infected staff between Feb 28 and Mar 15, 2021 (page 35). Twenty-six of them were carrying the B.1.1.7 variant (page 14). Instead of isolating everyone or moving guests to safety — the purported purpose of the hotels in the first place — officials let the situation roll.

At multiple sites, PHAC allowed high-risk staff to return to work after negative tests, without isolating, which was the purpose of the hotels for travellers.  There were no investigations at some locations (page 23). There was no contact tracing (page 29).

The government was running a quarantine regime where staff outbreaks were treated like minor inconveniences (which is how they should have been treated) — unless they hit the media.

Which they did.

Only revealed after CBC got involved

At the Crowne Plaza in Toronto, a staff member ended up in the ICU. But it wasn't PHAC that flagged the danger — it was an employee who called the press (page 23). A full-blown outbreak, ignored — as it should have been — until the media embarrassed them.

"The outbreak captured much media attention when an employee tested positive for COVID contacted CBC to inform the media of the COVID outbreak in the workplace."

Hotel managers begged PHAC to tell them which guests had tested positive so they could take proper cleaning precautions. PHAC refused, citing privacy laws — privacy which didn't exist for the rest of us who had to divulge vaccination status to go to the pub or travel or go to work.

Yet on page 17, officials admitted that not identifying infected guests gave staff a false sense of security and made them less cautious.

So the government's own policies led to staff lowering their guard in the middle of outbreaks that the government said were deadly.

These weren't quarantine hotels. They were infection hotels.

Let's recap:

• The government locked up healthy Canadians in hotel rooms — at their own expense.

• PHAC knew there were COVID outbreaks among hotel staff.

• They refused to move travellers or alert the public.

• Investigations were late, absent, or ignored.

• And it all only came out because the documents had to be released under transparency laws.

So the next time a Liberal MP tells you they "followed the science," ask them this:

Why did your government confine healthy people in outbreak zones? Why did you hide it? And how many got sick because of your decisions? Or did you know something about COVID that the rest of us were called science deniers for talking about?

The documents prove it: this wasn't public health. It was a publicly funded biohazard in the name of following the science.