Canada May Invoke Emergencies Act to Limit Pandemic Travel

Today’s post was triggered by a report from CBC: Garneau won’t rule out invoking Emergencies Act to limit pandemic travel.

Note that we recently wrote a post entitled: Update on Canadian Travel Restrictions that we recommend that you read first, because today’s post aims to supplement what was mentioned there.

Highlights

Before we get into our commentary, we will mention a few highlights from the report:

• The Canadian government is considering COVID-19 testing at land borders and invoking the federal Emergencies Act to limit travel.
• The Canadian Prime Minister is warning against any non-essential travel.
• The United States moves to strengthen land border measures.
• The Canada-United States border remains closed to non-essential travel until February 21, 2021.

Now onto our commentary of some of the more contentious highlights.

Emergencies Act

Personally, I feel that when the government hints at something ahead of time, it means they are strongly considering it and there is a high likelihood of it happening. In this case, they are hinting at implementing the Emergencies’ Act, to prepare everyone when it does come into effect, so that they can tell us that they did warn us. You probably read in multiple news article about the Prime Minster urging Canadians to cancel any non-essential trips, especially with March break approaching.

For them not to implement the Emergencies’ Act, I feel that we would need to see a drastic shift in the pandemic worldwide. Maybe I’m wrong, but I do feel it’s coming and this is their way of warning everyone.

United States Land Border Measures

If we eventually do have rapid testing, I would hope to see it on both sides of the board. It will probably be very expensive to implement, but the benefits should outweigh the cost?

I think that if they do implement testing at the land borders, it would only be fair that if anyone is tested positive would have to turn around to quarantine, right? It would defeat the purpose if the person gets through anyway.

I would assume that real hope is that it would deter people who have potential symptoms from even trying to cross the border to slow the overall spread?

Final Thoughts

Here at Pointshogger, we definitely do not want to see people running into travel issues, so we definitely cannot endorse any sort of travel right now, regardless of how much we are itching to travel.

The requirement for the 72-hour negative test result who are already abroad caught a lot of people off guard. So please book your trips with caution knowing that the situation can change rapidly. As in, one set of rules can apply when you book your trip. Another set of rules can be in place when you leave on your trip. And another set of rules can be in place while you are abroad about to come back.