What are Canada’s latest COVID-19 travel restrictions? Quarantine hotels and airport testing explained
To keep out highly contagious COVID-19 variants, Canada is tightening restrictions to keep caseloads under control – and if you’re coming home from abroad, it’ll cost you. Here’s what you need to know
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As foreign COVID-19 variants spread more quickly, and vaccine shipments to Canada arrive more slowly, the federal government is stepping up their restrictions on travel to make sure hospitals aren’t overwhelmed.
If you’re planning to go abroad, the Prime Minister strongly suggests you don’t. And if you’re already overseas, you should be prepared for new measures when you come home, such as mandatory tests at the airport or hotel quarantines that you’ll have to pay for.
Here’s what you need to know.
Which travel rules are changing?
WHO HAS TO BE TESTED, WHEN AND WHERE
The new federal rules: Testing is about to be mandatory for new international arrivals at the Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver airports, which will be the only places authorized to accept overseas flights as of next week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday. Those tests, which have no announced start date, will decide how long you spend in quarantine and where (more on that later). Eventually, tests will be required at Canada-U.S. land border crossings too.
The new provincial rules: Ontario is instituting its own mandatory tests at Pearson starting Feb. 1 that will act as a stopgap until the federal ones come into effect, Premier Doug Ford said Friday, adding that more testing will come to land crossings with the United States “as soon as possible.”
The federal rules before: It’s still mandatory under federal law, as it has been since early January, for travellers to give a negative COVID-19 test to the airline before being allowed to board a flight into Canada. There’s a list of accepted test types and exempted groups, including children under 5, airline crews and some classes of essential workers. No foreign national with COVID-19 symptoms is allowed to fly.
QUARANTINE HOTELS IN CANADA
The new rules: Anyone arriving in Canada from abroad will have to wait for the results of their airport test for up to three days at a supervised hotel, Mr. Trudeau says. Travellers have to pay for the hotel stay in advance, which Mr. Trudeau estimated would cost about $2,000 a person. Those who test negative will be able to go home and complete the rest of their 14-day quarantine there, but anyone who tests positive will stay at a government facility where health officials will establish whether they have a more infectious variant such as the Brazilian and British ones.
The rules before: Since last March, all new arrivals have had to self-isolate at their destinations for 14 days, which sometimes meant infected people would end up with uninfected ones in households where they couldn’t isolate from one another. Hotel quarantining was allowed, but not mandatory as it is in jurisdictions such as New Zealand.
‘SUN DESTINATIONS’ OFF LIMITS
The new rules: Air Canada, WestJet, Sunwing and Air Transat have agreed to suspend flights to “sun destinations” such as the Caribbean and Mexico from Jan. 30 until at least April 30, Mr. Trudeau says. Arrangements will be made to bring Canadians back from those places.
The rules before: Until now, Canadians were generally free to leave the country as long as their destinations allowed them to enter, and as long as they had the means to get the right tests when coming back.
Which travel rules are the same?
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WHO IS A NON-ESSENTIAL TRAVELLER
Tourism and cross-border shopping are definitely not essential, but some kinds of family-reunification travel are allowed. Most of the permitted types of travel are for Canadian citizens or permanent residents only: Foreign nationals can’t enter unless they’re protected workers or asylum claimants, or if they’ve applied to enter on other compassionate grounds.
WHO CAN CROSS THE LAND BORDER
The Canada-U.S. border is closed to all but essential travel, and some crossings may be completely shut by the Canada Border Services Agency to redirect its resources elsewhere.
IS INTERPROVINCIAL TRAVEL ALLOWED?
That depends on where you live and where you’re going. Quebec, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta and B.C. haven’t enacted legal measures to stop out-of-province arrivals, though their health officials strongly advise against non-essential travel in or out. In the Atlantic provinces and Arctic territories, authorities have barred entry from the rest of Canada except for work, school or other essential reasons. Those jurisdictions and Manitoba require newcomers to self-isolate at their destinations for 14 days. Here are the guidelines for Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Yukon.
What are the penalties for breaking the travel rules?
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Federal law: Penalties under the Quarantine Act can go as high as $750,000 or six months in jail. Most fines issued in the first seven months of the pandemic were between $275 and $1,275, and 77 people were fined nationwide, according to Public Health Agency of Canada data obtained by the CBC in October.
Provincial law: Many of the fines issued by local police have to do with physical distancing and non-essential businesses, but travel-related offenses, such as lying to contact tracers about where you or your friends have been, can also get you in trouble. For instance, a couple in Whitby, Ont., that had the British COVID-19 variant were charged in January under Ontario’s Health Protection and Promotion Act for allegedly not telling authorities they had been in contact with a traveller from Britain. The allegations have not been tested in court.
What about the Emergencies Act?
The federal travel restrictions so far have relied on the Quarantine Act, which governs international entry points to Canada such as land borders, sea ports and airports. Limiting movement within Canada (over and above what provinces have done on their own) would have been a more drastic step: Section 6 of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees Canadians the right to “move and take up residence in any province,” and “to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province,” so to limit these rights, the federal Emergencies Act might have been needed. None of the Trudeau government’s new rules require this act, the never-before-used successor to the War Measures Act that Mr. Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, used to controversial effect in the October Crisis of 1970. If the Emergencies Act is invoked in the future, a public inquiry has to be called at least two months after the emergency ends.
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