Everything you need to know about new travel rules taking effect today,
If you’re thinking of taking a vacation, here’s what to expect
New international air and land travel measures take effect Monday.
The new rules, rolled out over the past few weeks by the federal government, are in response to the discovery of more contagious COVID-19 variants around the world.
Even though some of the variants have already been identified in Canada and blamed for deadly outbreaks, Ottawa is banking on the new travel restrictions to help limit the importation of even more variant cases.
The federal government has been advising against non-essential international travel since last March, but it can’t legally prevent Canadians from leaving or entering the country.
So if you’re still thinking of leaving the country for non-essential reasons like a vacation, or if you’re away and looking to come back, how will these new rules affect you?
The Star compiled a series of questions, including from members of the public, with answers coming from government announcements, news releases, backgrounders and briefings with officials.
Before getting into the different rules for air and land, perhaps two of the biggest questions are:
Am I exempt from the travel restrictions if I’ve been vaccinated?
No, at least not for now. “There’s still some unanswered questions about the effectiveness of vaccines in reducing transmission and the duration of protection, but we expect those kinds of questions to get answered in the coming months,” Canada’s chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, said when the air travel measures were announced in January.
How long will these new measures be in place?
There is no set end date. A government official said at a recent briefing that measures will be in place “until such a time that we consider the risk of the new variants has been reduced sufficiently.”
TRAVELLING BY AIR
Which Canadian airports are still accepting international arrivals?
Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal.
What do you need to know before departing for Canada by air?
You must have received a negative COVID-19 molecular test (and not a rapid test) result within the last three days. You must also book a three-night stay at a government-approved hotel near the Canadian airport at which you’ll be arriving.
Bookings can only be done by phone at 1-800-294-8253.
If you’ve tested positive for COVID-19 in the past, you can also show proof of a positive result from at least 14 days prior to departure, and no more than 90 days before departure.
This is because according to the government, people who have recovered from COVID -19 and are no longer infectious can still test positive long after they’ve recovered.
What if you don’t show proof of a test?
The airline will deny you boarding, according to the government.
What happens once you land?
You must undergo another COVID-19 molecular test at the airport. You will then need to go into hotel quarantine pending the test result. You can travel using your personal vehicle or government transportation, but not public transportation.
The government has said this process can take up to three days and cost up to $2,000.
What if you refuse to undergo the arrival test?
Officers can direct you to go to a designated quarantine facility using government transportation, according to the order-incouncil outlining the restrictions.
What if you have pets?
Make sure to book a hotel that allows pets, says the government.
Can you go outside once you’re at the hotel?
People staying in the hotels are allowed outside for “limited and monitored outdoor time” as long as they don’t show symptoms, are wearing a mask and keeping their distance from others.
What happens if your arrival test comes back negative?
You’re allowed to leave the hotel — even if it’s been less than three days — and continue your 14-day quarantine at home if your quarantine plan is suitable. You will be tested again toward the end of the 14 days using an at-home collection kit given to you before leaving hotel quarantine.
If that test comes back negative, your quarantine ends on schedule. If it’s positive, you must quarantine for another 14 days starting on the day the test was taken.
What’s a “suitable” place of quarantine?
According to the order-incouncil, a suitable place of quarantine can be your home, but it must be somewhere where you can avoid all contact with other individuals with whom you did not travel, unless they are a minor.
What if your final destination is not one of the four cities where international arrivals are still permitted to land?
You must undergo your airport test and proceed to hotel quarantine in the city where you’ve landed. A government official said once the test comes back negative, people travelling to another part of the country will be able to take their connecting flight and continue their 14-day quarantine at their final destination if their quarantine plan is suitable.
What if the arrival test comes back positive?
You’ll be asked to transfer to a designated quarantine facility or you could be allowed to proceed to a different quarantine location, depending on your plan and how you’re getting there, a government official said.
Why not just use rapid tests, which can deliver results within minutes, instead of molecular tests, which can take one to three days?
Current Public Health Agency of Canada advice is that a molecular test “is the preferred test to determine whether someone is positive” a government official said.
Who is exempt from the new air travel requirements?
The government’s order-incouncil lists a few groups who are travelling for very specific circumstances, including members of the armed forces returning to perform duties in Canada and flight crew members, as well as people whom the chief public health officer has determined “will provide an essential service,” as long as they comply with conditions imposed on them.
Canadians who are regularly receiving “essential medical services or treatments in a foreign country” are also exempt if the person has a letter from a licensed Canadian health-care provider indicating the medical services are essential and a letter from a licensed health-care provider in the foreign country attesting that the services were provided there.
TRAVELLING BY LAND
What do you need to know before departing for the land border?
You have to make sure you’ve received a negative COVID-19 molecular test within the last three days, or proof you tested positive at least 14 days ago, and no more than 90 days ago.
What if you don’t provide proof of the test?
Foreign nationals will not be allowed entry into Canada. Canadian citizens and permanent residents cannot be sent back to the U.S., but could be directed to a designated quarantine facility.
What happens at the border?
You’ll be given two test kits; one kit so you can test yourself as soon as you start your quarantine, and the other to test yourself toward the end of your quarantine.
Depending on your land point entry, you’ll be able to do your first test on site. There will be 16 land border points of entry that will be able to do testing on site, starting with five on Monday and the other 11 on March 4.
Will I have to quarantine in a hotel if arriving by land?
No. You’ll be allowed to do your 14-day quarantine at home, as long as your quarantine plan is suitable.
Why do those arriving by air have to pay to quarantine in a hotel but those arriving by land can go straight home?
The government has said Canada simply does not have the infrastructure and staff to mandate hotel quarantine for those arriving by land, saying there are 117 land points of entry, some of which are in remote locations.
Isn’t the government worried Canadians abroad will just fly to the U.S. and cross the land border to avoid the stricter and more expensive air travel restrictions?
It’s an issue that was taken into consideration, a government official said, which is why the government is increasing testing requirements for those crossing by land to ensure COVID-19 cases are caught.
Who is exempt from the new land border measures?
Pretty much everyone currently crossing the border.
The Canada-U.S. land border has been closed to non-essential travel since the beginning of the pandemic. Essential workers, like commercial truckers and health-care workers, represent over 90 per cent of the people crossing the border and they are exempt from the new testing requirements.
The new land border measures will mainly affect Canadians who are already living in the U.S. and wanting to come home, such as snowbirds.
At the Special Criminal Court in Dublin, Ireland, on Wednesday afternoon Caolan Smyth was sentenced to 20 years for attempted murder.
On another Wednesday afternoon four years earlier, May 10, 2017, Smyth had walked up to a car parked at a gas station near the city’s airport and fired five bullets through a side window at his intended victim, who remarkably survived, his bulletproof vest shielding four shots and another shattering his jaw.
After the presiding judge described Smyth as a “ruthless, dangerous criminal” and handed down the 20-year sentence, the hitman turned to his family in the courtroom and said “five World Cups and I’ll be out.”
That Smyth reached for a sporting analogy (the FIFA World Cup takes place every four years) was fitting. For the story of this career criminal and an attempted murder that failed where so many had succeeded amid a bloody gangland war in the Irish capital is a sports story. A global one.
Smyth is a hitman for the Kinahan Cartel, an organized crime group named in the Irish courts as one of Europe’s most ruthless drug gangs. Those same courts have heard that Daniel Kinahan is the de facto head of the cartel. Kinahan also happens to be arguably the biggest power broker in world boxing right now, advising some of the sport’s marquee names, many of its reigning champions and arranging record-breaking fights from his base in Dubai.
Through MTK Global, the management and promotions group that he founded, Kinahan has rapidly taken a hold on the fight game in recent years. In an era of unrelenting sportswashing, it may be one of the most audacious attempts to launder a reputation through a sport.
As allegations of his criminality and the cartel’s trail of murder and misery have bubbled to the surface every so often, Kinahan has taken a step back. No longer involved, MTK would say, when things heated up. Months later, a fighter or promoter would let slip how Kinahan had played a crucial part in brokering a megafight and so the shadow dance would go. But in the wake of a damning forensic investigation by the BBC last week of these dual, constantly intertwined Kinahan operations — boxing and criminality — he is under the spotlight like never before. Where his notoriety was once limited to Irish shores, the world seems to finally be sitting up and taking notice.
It’s time for Canada to do likewise. Because, quietly, late last year, MTK Global expanded to these shores too.
MTK Alberta, based in Calgary, was launched with a release on the company’s website in late October. In the process it became MTK Global’s 21st worldwide location. Just weeks ago, the new outpost which is managed by one-time head of MTK’s MMA division, Kieran Keddle, announced the signing of its first batch of Canadian fighters. Neither of these moves created much of a stir even in the parochial confines of Canadian boxing, where news of expansion or investment has been particularly sparse as things ground to a halt during the COVID-19 pandemic. But given the fresh glare applied to MTK and its founder by the BBC investigation and the ensuing fallout over the past two weeks since it aired, the company’s presence here demands attention.
“Right away, people should be proactively looking to boycott MTK and get it out of Canada,” Neale Richmond, a member of the Irish parliament, told the Star this past week. “The sport of boxing and not just boxing but mixed martial arts, and Canadian society does not need that extended influence of Daniel Kinahan in their society.”
Richmond, who lived in Toronto as a student, has been an outspoken campaigner against Kinahan and his influence in the sport. His constituency is in Dublin but is a little removed from the areas of the city where the Kinahan cartel’s lethal feud with the rival Hutch gang has played out over the past six years claiming 18 lives. Removed too from the parts of the capital particularly blighted by drug problems, the heroin and cocaine that the Kinahan cartel have been reported to traffic so heavily in causing untold social devastation. Nonetheless Richmond has been at the forefront of political efforts to push back against what he sees as Kinahan’s attempt to launder his reputation through sports.
“The reason why as an Irish parliamentarian I take such an interest in it is, well, it’s our problem. And it’s our responsibility. The real misery that the Kinahan cartel has sown has been on the streets of Dublin, my home,” Richmond said.
“The (BBC) exposition, by brave investigative journalists, of who exactly Daniel Kinahan is, it’s paralyzed the sport of boxing. The sport of boxing knows that he’s extremely bad for business. But they’ve allowed him to not just ingratiate himself, but in many ways take over so much of it.”
Kinahan and his acolytes inside and outside the ropes point to the fact that he has never been convicted of any crime. They brush off the police affidavits in Ireland’s High Court that he is the head of a drug and arms operation that has generated over one billion Euros, having taken over from his father Christy Kinahan Sr., himself convicted of being a heroin dealer in the 1980s. They only want to speak of his passion for boxing.
The MTK takeover is headlined by one fighter in particular: heavyweight king Tyson Fury.
Kinahan is widely credited with turning around the wild career of the current WBC champion. Fury is the proud owner of a $100-million (U.S.) deal with ESPN and at some point later this year will take on fellow British heavyweight Anthony Joshua in a unification bout that is expected to be worth hundreds of millions more. In confirming the initial agreement of that bout on Instagram last summer, Fury name-checked Kinahan and thanked him profusely. In effect it was the beginning of a kind of closer scrutiny of Kinahan’s role that resulted in the BBC exposé.
Fury is far from alone in the MTK stable however. The group began life as MGM in Marbella, Spain at a time when police say the Kinahan cartel also happened to run its operations from the region. The management firm rebranded as MTK in the wake of a horrific shooting at a weigh-in of an event it was promoting in Dublin in 2016, the attack widely seen as an assassination attempt on Kinahan. MTK relocated to Dubai in 2018, two years after Kinahan had also moved to the Emirate.
It now has over 100 boxers and MMA fighters on its books, the three unheralded Canadians — Angelo Habib, Aaron Gallant and Brent Anderson — joining a swelling roster that includes other high-profile champions such as Billy Joe Saunders and Carl Frampton. It has been hoovering up prospects in the U.S. lately too and has its own media operation to chart every move. How it has been able to expand so rapidly — particularly at a time when boxing has been crippled by the pandemic — remains a pressing question.
“I’ve never witnessed the same sort of growth by any sort of organization. They want to control the sport. It’s as simple as that,” a Boxing Hall of Fame fighter turned promoter Barry McGuigan told the BBC documentary.
“It takes millions and millions of dollars to do what MTK have done. How can they sign all these fighters? Last week they signed nine fighters. Where is the money coming from to allow MTK to grow at such a ferocious rate?”
MTK Global and Kinahan lawyers told the BBC that “he had exited the business of MTK.” However in the days that followed (during which the documentary’s makers faced death threats), Kinahan himself released a statement to a British radio station again denying any criminality saying he was doing “his best to ignore the allegations that are constantly made about me.” A few lines later, he brazenly confirmed that he “continue(s) to be involved in planning multiple record-breaking and exciting world title fights.”
Record-breaking title fights are a world away from Canadian boxing right now. The pandemic has wrought a heavy toll here. In 2019, there were 59 live pro boxing events in Canada, according to BoxRec. Since the start of 2020, there has been just eight.
Nonetheless in a release announcing its Canadian launch, MTK quoted its chief strategy officer Paul Gibson saying “we’ve had our eye on Canada for a while.” He said MTK Alberta hoped to have “live boxing events within the coming 12 months.”
While there is no implication that MTK Alberta, Keddle or any of the three fighters are linked to any wrongdoings, the Star did approach MTK multiple times to request clarification of the company’s plans for Canada, whether Kinahan is still involved with MTK and if he had any involvement in the decision to expand here. We received no response.
Other Canadian promoters have appeared equally reluctant to comment on the expansion, in keeping with the wider boxing community’s largely look-any-other-way approach to Kinahan. However, Toronto promoter Lee Baxter did admit he will be wary of MTK’s thirst for recruitment.
“I’ll be very much more alert and aware of what’s going on because once a contract is signed, it’s hard to unsign it,” Baxter, who has worked with MTK’s Saunders in the past, told the Star. “If these guys come in and sign a lot of guys, and even if they give them a bad contract, it’s still there. So I have to mind my p’s and q’s.”
For their part, Calgary’s Combative Sports Commission, which regulates fight events in the municipality, confirmed to the Star that Keddle and MTK Alberta haven’t yet applied for a licence to hold live events. “To hold a promoter’s licence in Calgary, the application process must also include a police background check of the promoter and all shareholders,” chair Shirley Stunzi added.
Smyth, the Kinahan hitman jailed on Wednesday, was just the latest success for An Garda Síochána, the Irish police, who have put upwards of 60 cartel members behind bars. For his part, Richmond has continued his efforts, writing to major broadcasters to urge them not to broadcast cards involving MTK fighters. This week he wrote to the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador, asking the country to reconsider Kinahan’s residence there.
“For all the TV companies, other promoters, fighters, previously they used to be able to go about their business with a degree of ignorance — ‘Kinahan’s not involved. He’s never been convicted of a crime.’ That has changed with these court rulings,” Richmond said. “It changed with the high profile that Kinahan himself sought. No one can do business with MTK or Daniel Kinahan and pretend like they don’t know that they’re dealing with Ireland’s largest mob boss, who quite literally has blood on his hands.
“MTK is an extension of him. And the money they’re taking, where did that money come from originally? It came from extortion. It came from crime. It came from murder.”
MTK Alberta, based in Calgary, was launched with a release on the company’s website in late October