Canada’s travel bans are discriminatory
Concern about the arrival of the omicron variant has ushered in another round of COVID-19 control measures around the world at national borders and beyond, including testing, quarantines, travel restrictions and bans. Canada has introduced measures including arrival testing for travelers - excluding those coming from the United States - and an outright ban on foreign nationals who have visited one or more of 10 countries in Africa, including South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria. That policy is an ineffective, discriminatory mistake.
In its release outlining the measures, the Canadian government notes: “Moving forward, border testing surveillance will be adjusted based on the latest available evidence to further reduce the risk of importation of this variant.” The underlying message is that these are extraordinary but necessary limits driven by evidence and subject to amendment as new information comes to light. The world is still learning about the mutated strain, but it is causing concern given just how many mutations it carries. Whatever we learn about omicron, however, we already know that travel bans are more political theater than sound, evidence-based practice. And such performance acts come at a price that will be paid inequitably by those who can afford to bear the cost the least - the same folks who tend to bear such consequences most often, whether we’re talking travel bans, protective equipment supply or vaccine access.
In the Globe and Mail, Africa bureau chief Geoffrey York writes that travel bans in southern Africa “have had a disastrous effect on already battered economies.” He quotes South African infectious-disease specialist Marc Mendelson, who calls the bans “a grand exhibition of futility and discrimination.” There may be no better way to put it. In the Hill Times, Erica Ifill takes Canada’s travel measures to their implicit, or explicit, end, calling them “swift and anti-black.” “By imposing a travel ban on African countries that will do little to stop the spread of the variant, it left out the rich countries (read: white) that have also detected the variant,” Ifill writes. She points out that several other countries with omicron cases eluded the ban, including Belgium, Germany, Israel and Britain. Oh, and the United States.
Not only do travel bans tend to be disproportionately focused on poorer and majority-black countries - the same states that tend to be discriminated against in a system of vaccine apartheid, as Ifill points out - but the measures undermine the very global cooperation necessary to battle the pandemic and bring it to an end, or at least under long-term control. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization said travel bans have affected information sharing on the emerging variant, including the shipment of samples required to study omicron. The organization notes also that the variant is now in 23 countries. WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has also said, citing the U.S. ban on travelers from South Africa, that such undertakings risk future variant detection efforts because a ban “disincentivizes countries from alerting others to threats that will inevitably land on their shores.” Indeed. And Canada is part of the problem.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has never missed a chance to drive home the claim that his government bases its public policy on evidence. Evidence-based X, Y and Z have become familiar refrains, even as evidence suggests that certain policies misguided, ineffective or worse. Travel bans, especially inequitable ones, are morally wrong and not supported by evidence. If the Trudeau government values evidence-based policymaking over politics-based evidence making, it should reflect that in its actions.
Canada should revoke its travel bans currently in place and commit to not pursuing future bans unless the country can be certain that such measures are not only effective and timely, but also that they leave no doubt that the return from their undertaking overwhelmingly outweighs the costs both for the country itself and other countries affected by it.
Throughout the pandemic, we have heard politicians tell us that we are all in this together. Their actions seldom fulfill the promise of their words. Once more, this is the case, but it’s also an opportunity to do better. The Trudeau government should take it, end the travel bans and set an example for its peer states in the process.