The issue with opening bars it isn't totally about bars. It's about the broad message. Most people aren't listening to daily press conferences. They aren't parsing guidance that varies by region and week. They are picking up on broad messages about what is safe and what isn't.

So what I would worry about with bars isn't just that people will go to them and possibly get sick. It's that, on a broad level, people will hear that bars are open and feel like, okay, if it's fine to go to a bar, it has to be fine to have a small party.

And yes, you can read into the specifics about what's allowed in bars and break down the details about social distancing, and social circles vs. social gatherings, but if there's one thing politicians know, it's that most people don't absorb messages with that kind of nuance.

This might actually be the one area where political expertise as opposed to public policy expertise could be useful in this pandemic. Successful politicians know how to make a message stick: Keep it simple and hammer it over and over again.

If you get too complicated, if you get bogged down in details, your message won't stick. The top-level message with Stage 3 is that bars can open. What people are going to absorb from that is that bars are safe. And if bars are safe, other bar-like situations will be safe too.

Put it another way: Rob Ford is never mayor if he runs on stopping the gravy train in sequential phases by neighbourhood, depending on local conditions.

And listen, you can get mad at young people all you want. But yelling at young people to stop being stupid is pretty close to useless as a public health intervention. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/dont-blame-the-covidiots-blame-the-messengers-why-some-people-dont-take-the-pandemic-warnings-seriously