June 10, 2021

Vegas is open baby! This week Las Vegas, Nevada announced all restrictions have been lifted in sin city. No more lockdowns and people are free to gamble in the casinos and no longer have to wear masks. 

Thursday night the Vegas Knights hockey team played in front of a full crowd of mostly maskless people and watched their team dispatch the Colorado Avalanche from the NHL playoffs. The next round takes them up against the Montreal Canadians. It will be an interesting series and showcases how different the approaches in our two countries are. It also shows how much better they have been in dealing with vaccinations. 

In Vegas, they will be playing before a full crowd of almost 19,000 people. In Montreal, they have allowed only 2500. The Habs have requested a larger capacity crowd but it will not be a full Bell Centre. This series should showcase how loud the fans are in each building. I think Canadian fans will prove their worth and hope they can increase the number of spectators as the series goes on. 

I hope that when they present the Stanley Cup it will be in Montreal and it will be to a full crowd of celebrating fans – dare to dream…

The differing approaches have a lot to do with climate. Political and environmental. In Montreal, the weather is just getting warm and the case counts have been dropping. In Vegas, the weather has been warm for a long time and cases dropped a while ago. They also have done much better in vaccinating the population. Politically Nevada is also a world apart from Quebec.

When this insidious virus began we looked down our proverbial noses at the country to the south. Trump was dismissing it as only the flu and they were suffering a much larger surge of cases and deaths. Now here we are a year later and Canada has yet to fully contend with our viral foe and the US is almost completely opened up and recovering. 

Even after the election of Joe Biden, the US was much more aggressive in re-opening its economy. Canada has been slower in many ways including getting vaccines into the arms of its populace. When the baseball season started, the Toronto Blue Jays couldn’t play at home nor could they cross the border. Their first game was played in Texas in front of forty-thousand fans. At the time we wondered if this would cause a massive increase in cases there. Were the Americans making a big mistake – apparently not? Questions linger and the right answer is hard to come by. 

In the last couple of months, we had a massive surge in case counts in Canada, yet the death rate remained low. Our government has continued to try to protect us from ourselves. I guess that is what we elected them for – or is it?

In less than a week our province has promised to open the travel restrictions. We should see a massive influx of people into our beautiful valley. Part of me misses the peace and quiet the pandemic gave us. We can’t return to the way we were, I hope we can find a new way to live that will balance our material needs with our spiritual ones. 

Sin City is wide open and the world is slowly returning to a state of normalcy. Will Canadians be able to return to travel to visit our neighbours to the south? Will we simply return to the addictive consumption we lived before the pandemic swept the world? I hope as a society we can learn from the last year of chaos and find a better way to live going forward.