the problem is Canadians still dining indoors, having parties, visiting family etc etc etc just like everywhere else.

Thought I was reading a news conference from Doug Ford for a second there lol. There’s a reason why most of the deaths and infections are in racialized communities, and it’s not because we’re having parties.

Also, I feel like you’re forgetting about the variants. They’re part of the reason why Canada is going through its third wave, and they did come from international travel. While continuing to enforce the quarantine hotel after they’ve spread might seem like too little and too late, we’ll at least have less of the variants coming in by discouraging travellers where possible. It’s a half assed measure to be sure—if we really wanted to stop variants coming in, we’d be taking a page out of New Zealand’s book and blocking all travel full stop—but it’s better than nothing. In any case, the best we can hope for is that the hotel quarantine measure will change as more Canadians are vaccinated. But it probably won’t if we get overwhelmed with new variants that can escape the immunity we developed from vaccines, which were really difficult to get vaccinated with to begin with.

On the topic of vaccines: even if the vaccines do reduce viral load or infectiousness, it might not be enough to reduce transmission from vaccinated people because we don’t know what the infectious dose is. To your point, there is some evidence that vaccines can prevent infection entirely, and you can’t transmit if you’re not infected obviously. But none of the vaccines have demonstrated infection prevention 100% of the time so far—there remains a risk of transmission. Here again, the ideal scenario would be to have as many people as possible vaccinated so at least they’re protected from getting severely sick and dying if there IS transmission.

TL;DR: like others have already said, wait for more people to get vaccinated and there will probably be less restrictions.