Mandatory hotel quarantine for international flyers not meant to be punitive, Trudeau says.

Opposition calls for exemptions to hotel stay

OTTAWA • Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the government isn't aiming to punish international air travellers by requiring them to spend up to three days in a hotel quarantine when returning to Canada at their own expense.

As concerns rise around COVID-19 variants that make it more transmissible, Trudeau and other government ministers spent Friday outlining a series of new border measures meant to crack down on non-essential travellers.

Trudeau said Canada now has “some of the strongest measures in the world” on its borders. He said the new rule for air travellers, which takes effect Feb. 22, is the only way the government can ensure travellers aren't spreading the virus while waiting for a PCR test result (a lab-based polymerase chain reaction test).

“We're aware that we need to be thoughtful and compassionate about people who are in extremely difficult situations and absolutely need to travel,” Trudeau said at a Friday news conference. “We're not trying to punish people. We're trying to keep people safe ... and discouraging all non-essential travel and ensuring that if people do have to travel, they're doing the things that we can be certain are going to prevent the virus from spreading further in Canada, particularly given new variants.”

Trudeau said only a PCR test ensures the traveller does not have even a small amount of virus in them; a rapid test isn't accurate enough for this purpose.

“That PCR test, particularly if there are significant numbers of travellers, could take two or three days to get a result,” he said. “As soon as they get the result of that PCR test, they will be free to go home and quarantine themselves. It's not a punitive measure to keep people in quarantine for three days while they get the result, it's just so that we can get a negative result off of that test.”

Only four airports are accepting international flights under the new rules: Toronto, Montreal, Calgary or Vancouver. Travellers must also already have a 14-day plan to quarantine after arriving, and must take another PCR test at the end of it.

Being vaccinated will not exempt an air traveller from the mandatory hotel quarantine, said Health Minister Patty Hajdu.

“We know that vaccination prevents against serious illness and protects against death associated with COVID-19,” she said. “But the research is still developing and emerging around the reduction of infectiousness for people that may contract COVID-19 despite being vaccinated and despite having a less severe case.”

The mandatory hotel quarantine will cost a traveller up to $2,000, but Hajdu said the billing may be adjusted based on the circumstances, such as when a traveller is able to leave early due to getting a negative test result.

“The billing will be done through the hotels and the hotels will have flexibility to adjust their billing as they see fit,” Hajdu told reporters. “The hotels will of course have a number of additional expenses related to infection prevention control, meal delivery and other aspects of providing quality care for Canadians who are serving quarantines in hotels. And so those decisions will be left at the discretion of the hotel.”

Conservative MPs Michelle Rempel Garner and Pierre Paul-Hus called on the Liberals to allow exemptions to the mandatory hotel stay for unaccompanied minors and for Canadians travelling for non-elective medical procedures, family reunification, and for “compassionate travel for those affected by end-of-life or medical emergencies.”

Travellers in those categories should be allowed “to quarantine at home, in compliance with pre- and post-arrival testing requirements,” they said in a joint statement.

Meanwhile, starting on Monday non-essential travellers crossing the border by land will also have to take a PCR test within 72 hours of arriving. However, they won't be mandated to quarantine in a hotel.

“At land borders, we have 117 different points of entry,” said Public Safety Minister Bill Blair. “Many of those points of entry are located in remote, rural areas that are not readily accessible to hotels, for example, or other amenities that would be required to have those people quarantine in those facilities.”

On top of that, travellers arriving at the Canada/U.S. border must show proof of “a valid molecular test” taken in the United States within the past 72 hours.

Blair pointed out that while an airline can deny boarding to anyone who doesn't show proof of a recent negative test, it's not that simple at the land border, as Canada can't legally deny entry to a citizen. However, those who show up without proof of a test may be fined up to $3,000 or even prosecuted. Foreign nationals who don't have proof of a test will be denied entry, Blair said.

There will still be exemptions to these testing and quarantine requirements, including essential workers such as truckers and emergency service providers, as well as some people living in cross-border communities.

“The government will continue to assess exemptions on a case-by-case basis,” Hajdu said.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had yet another opportunity to confront China recently by threatening to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, but like he has done with the decision over whether to ban Huawei from Canada's 5G networks, his government timidly refused to take a stand and passed the buck to someone else.

“The decision on whether or not to participate in Olympic and Paralympic games lies with the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic committees, as they operate independently of the government,” a Foreign Affairs spokesperson told the National Post, essentially saying that the decision over whether to play games in a country that is committing genocide and holding our citizens hostage will be given less political consideration than whether the NHL and MLB could play games on Canadian soil during the pandemic.

Not surprisingly, the COC quickly reiterated its position that Canada will absolutely be participating in the Games. “Faced with only two options — go or don't go — our approach is to be present,” wrote David Shoemaker and Karen O'Neill, the CEOs of the Canadian

Olympic Committee (COC) and Canadian Paralympic Committee, respectively, in an op-ed published in the Globe and Mail.

Yet the case for refusing to play along with China's global public relations campaign is compelling. Since 2017, China has detained upwards of two million Uyghur people in internment camps, where they have reportedly been subjected to brainwashing, torture, forced sterilization, systematic rape and forced labour.

The U.S. government has said that the actions China has taken against its Uyghur minority amount to a “genocide,” as have numerous human rights organizations. This was also the view taken by a Liberal-chaired House of Commons subcommittee looking into human rights abuses in China, which concluded that, “The actions of the Chinese Communist Party constitute genocide as laid out in the Genocide Convention.”

But international law is much like a pack of toothless pit bulls: it has bark, but not a lot of bite. In the absence of war, which no one wants, holding a large country like China, which has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and exerts control over many other international bodies, to account must be done through more creative means. And if there's one thing China's Communist rulers don't like it's being made to look bad.

Calls for a boycott have been echoed by a coalition of 180 human rights groups, along with MPs in both Canada and the United Kingdom. It's not the groundswell that would be needed to make any real difference, but even this appears to have got the attention of Beijing: this week, the editor of the state-backed Global Times newspaper took to Twitter to threaten sanctions against any country that dared stay home.

If an active genocide, a coverup that led to a pandemic, unfair trade practices, corporate and state espionage and taking away Hong Kong's autonomy in violation of its treaty obligations were not enough to thumb our collective noses at Beijing, Canada has an additional reason: China has been holding two Canadians — Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor — hostage for over two years now, in retaliation for Canadian authorities arresting Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou on an extradition warrant from the U.S.

Meng has been given full due process rights and has been fighting her extradition in court, while the two Michaels have not even been granted their right to consular visits during much of their incarceration.

While it would be unlikely that an Olympic host country such as China would have the audacity to detain foreign athletes or other delegates, it seems odd that we would even give it the opportunity. Shoemaker has already stated that the COC will “talk to our athletes about the implications of what they say and of the topics that they choose to speak about,” out of fear that some of them could be arrested under China's sweeping new national-security law that has been used to arrest critics of the regime.

There is a precedent for such a boycott. After Soviet troops marched across the Afghan border in December 1979, U.S. president Jimmy Carter took a firm stand and announced that the United States would not be participating in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow unless the Soviet Union withdrew. Canada followed suit soon after. By the time the Games started, an international coalition of 65 countries had come together to boycott the event.

In their op-ed, Shoemaker and O'Neill argued that the boycott didn't lead to meaningful change, noting that, “The Games went ahead — and the Soviets remained in Afghanistan for almost another decade.”

While true, it should also be noted that South Africa was banned from competing in the Olympics for 21 years under the Apartheid regime. That, along with sustained economic sanctions, eventually led to the downfall of the regime and the racist system it upheld. Unfortunately, despite years of Chinese human rights abuses and Beijing treating Ottawa like a punching bag, Trudeau has refused to take any meaningful action against it.

In the best-case-scenario, the 2022 Games would be moved to another country. China's propaganda machine could downplay a country like Canada not showing up, but there would be no way for the government to save face in front of its people if the whole world decided to go elsewhere. There's not a lot of time left, so the Games would have to be held in a city that already has the facilities. If that doesn't happen, Canada should boycott the Games entirely.

TRUDEAU HAS REFUSED TO TAKE ANY MEANINGFUL ACTION.