Saint John family makes up for lost time after grandmothers expelled from N.B. during COVID
Two Mexican women in their 60s ordered to go home after flying through Toronto and Montreal in 2021
Lorena Rico still feels the sting from her mother being expelled from New Brunswick in a manner that felt cruel and confusing, in a country she'd admired so much she made it her new home.
Rico, who works in marketing and communications in Saint John, was on the cusp of becoming a new mother in January 2021 and thought she had prepared her own mother and her husband's mother for every contingency of travelling during COVID, so they could come from Mexico to help care for the new baby when it arrived.
"We definitely wanted them both here," said Rico, who had immigrated to New Brunswick along with her husband under the provincial nominee program and had no family in the province to support them.
Both women had taken PCR tests, prepared their paperwork and passports and declared their entry into the country on the ArriveCAN app.
With baby clothes and other gifts stowed in their bags, Teresa Aguila, then 65, and Maria Sunol, then 68, flew Air Canada from Mexico City to Toronto, then Toronto to Montreal.
Their flight from Montreal to Fredericton was uneventful until they were stopped after they stepped into the Fredericton airport by officers with the Department of Public Safety .
The women were told they were violating New Brunswick's mandatory order, which had just been tightened two days before.
Nearby at the arrivals area, Rico was waiting for the women.
"It's a very small airport, they should have come out quickly," she said.
"We started seeing people coming out, coming out, coming out. Then out of nowhere I get a call from my mom saying, 'Lorena, we're being deported.' She was crying so much."
Peace officers wanted the soon-to-be-grandmothers out of the province on the next available flight.
"What if you get sick?" Aguila and Rico recall an officer asking them. "You'd be taking a hospital bed away from a Canadian."
It's been 3½ years since the New Brunswick government first invoked emergency orders to try to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
There's been no public accounting of some of the effects of the order. Families missed weddings, graduations, reunions, funerals and surgeries under rules that changed and shifted between March 2020 and March 2022.
Whether the province handled the global threat with care and compassion, or made missteps that caused unnecessary pain and suffering, there's been no external audit to say one way or the other.
The first volume of the auditor general's report might contain clues, but it has been delayed. And a promised review by the Department of Health is not expected to be made public.
Rico's loss was not having her mother's support during the first intensely challenging and sleep-deprived weeks of caring for a newborn.
"I'm an only child," said Rico, explaining why it all mattered so much. "She's my mom."
On the one hand, she was caught by horrible timing and bad luck.
Two days before her mother landed, New Brunswick had returned to full lockdown. A surge of infections and a 13th COVID death, prompted the Saint John, Fredericton and Moncton health zones to go to Level Red.
What that meant exactly at that time has been lost in the fog of mandatory order revisions.
But if the purpose of that order was reducing the number of infections and exposures, then how the rules were applied in this case appeared to defy common sense, Rico said.
Because there was no immediate flight out of Fredericton, the women were allowed to travel in the back seat of the family car to Saint John, Rico's home city.
They were then ordered to stay in a hotel until they could catch a flight out of Moncton three days later, which then required a $200 taxi ride.
Rico says these steps must surely have increased potential disease transmission — both to the future grandmothers and to everyone with whom they came into contact.
"We were prepared to quarantine them in our home," said Rico. The family would have also complied with a 14-day quarantine for the women at the hotel, as a last resort.
Instead, they passed through four international airports on their way back to Mexico City.
Rico and her husband spent the next few days calling everyone they thought might help them, including their member of Parliament. But no one seemed able to help.
Rico said she started to reconsider how far she should push, since she was not yet a Canadian citizen.
"I don't want to get into trouble. I don't want to be deported myself. It was a very scary situation."
She and her husband say they did their best to manage alone.
Rico says she loves Canada and was proud to become a Canadian citizen last year,
She says she and her husband have always admired Canada's multiculturalism, its democracy, the feeling of personal safety, the opportunities here and the health system.
She says they even love the snow, but she and her mother still get highly emotional when they remember how the situation was handled.
Speaking through tears, Aguila remembers.
"She was pregnant. We want to be with her because they were alone, here in Canada," she said.
"I'm happy [to] meet my grandson. That's very very nice for me. To hold him and my daughter also."
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