Whether by land or air, travellers to Canada must test negative

Travellers must get swabbed three times crossing from U.S.

Canada simply does not have the infrastructure to force people crossing the land border into hotel quarantine, the federal government said Friday, and is banking on new testing requirements to reduce the spread of more contagious COVID-19 variants.

As of Monday, Canadians crossing the border from the United States for non-essential reasons will have to show proof of a negative COVID-19 test taken with the last three days. Some groups are exempt, such as commercial truckers.

And as of Feb. 22, travellers crossing for non-essential reasons will also have to undergo another COVID-19 test at the border, and yet another test toward the end of their 14-day quarantine, which can they spend at home.

Meanwhile, also as of Feb. 22, those arriving in Canada by air will be tested at the airport and required to quarantine in a government-approved hotel at their own expense while they wait for the test result, as previously announced by the government last month. Ottawa said this process could take up to three days and cost the traveller up to $2,000.

Should the test come back negative, the individual will be allowed to spend the rest of the 14-day quarantine at home, with the government promising “increased surveillance and enforcement.” If the test is positive, the individual will have to continue their quarantine in a government facility.

International air travel into Canada has been limited to airports in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal.

There are 117 land border points of entry from the U.S., some of which are in remote locations, and measures such as mandatory hotel quarantine “simply aren’t possible, given the existing infrastructure that’s available,” Public Safety Minister Bill Blair said Friday.

The government is instead relying on the new border testing requirements to help catch cases of COVID-19, including in individuals who may choose to drive across the border to avoid the more stringent and costly air travel restrictions.

“The measures we are introducing in the land mode are based on proportionality to the air mode, it’s not precise symmetry,” Blair said.

He said more than 90 per cent of the people currently crossing the border are essential workers — such as trucker drivers, health-care workers and technicians — and therefore exempt from the new requirements.

The government should be limiting the number of land points of entry for non-essential travel, which would make it possible to place travellers in hotel quarantine similar to the air travel measures, argues Kelley Lee, Canada research chair in global health governance at Simon Fraser University.

“Otherwise you’re having this incentive to go through these loopholes ... There’s still that incentive to shift from air to land,” she said. “We are next door to the epicentre of new variants.”

While requiring travellers crossing the border to quarantine in a designated facility would have been ideal, the new testing rules mean that the land border is more secure than it was just a few weeks ago, said Robert Greenhill, a former deputy minister and president of the Canadian International Development Agency.

Greenhill is also co-founder of Covid Strategic Choices, which studies the optimal strategy to manage COVID-19 in Canada. He said the next frontier is what to do about essential workers who are exempt from the testing requirements.

Trucker drivers alone currently represent about 74 per cent of land border crossings. Greenhill said they should be tested regularly, and the government should make it a priority to vaccinate them.

“The big remaining issue is a more effective protocol to deal with the truckers and other essential workers crossing the border,” he said. “That remains probably Canada’s biggest exposure right now.”

A government official said the idea of testing essential workers at the border is still being assessed and “not completely off the table.”