“There is honestly a gap because Americans have previously placed no restriction on international flights entering the United States,” Canada’s Secretary of State Bill Blair told a news conference on Friday.
“It concerns us because the restriction is on our land border, but not with air travel,” he added.
While the border between Canada and the US remains closed and all unimportant travel is banned until at least February 21, during the ten months since the introduction of the border restrictions, hundreds of thousands of travelers have undertaken discretionary travel between the two countries, as air travel has not so far subject to restrictions.
Since the United States did not impose any air travel restrictions from Canada, the gap allowed everything from Canadian snowbirds to the warm climates of Florida and Arizona for the winter to family members on both sides of the border, imposing non-essential visits.
Trudeau to Canadians: Avoid Travel
On Friday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau underlined his plea to Canadians to stay home and avoid travel of any kind, including travel to domestic and foreign countries.
Trudeau acknowledged that he could not constitutionally prevent Canadians from traveling, but warned that it could soon become much more difficult to return to Canada.
“We can introduce new measures that significantly impede your ability to return to Canada at any given moment without warning,” Trudeau said at a news conference Friday, adding: “The bottom line is: this is not the time to travel across the country. ‘
International airlines currently entering Canada must provide evidence of a negative test result for Covid-19 taken within 72 hours of departure and is also subject to a mandatory 14-day quarantine with offenders being fined severely. There are exceptions for essential workers.
Looking for more measures
Canadian officials say they are looking for more measures that will discourage as much travel as possible, and they hope a new agreement with the United States will help.
“We are looking at a number of measures that could include further restrictions on international travel, additional detection measures, additional quarantine measures and enforcement measures, to discourage people and encourage them to undertake unnecessary travel,” Blair said Friday.
Officials also indicated that weeks of shutdowns in most of Canada are slowly starting to work with new daily cases of Covid-19.
“It gives us hope that community control measures will start to take effect,” said Dr. Theresa Tam, head of public health in Canada, said. “But it is still too early to make sure these measures are strong enough and broad enough to put us on a steady downward trend.”
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