Flying across the border? Canada still wants a COVID-19 test

Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos says Omicron is surging globally, and that Ottawa has the responsibility to oversee Canada’s borders.

Thestar.com
Jan. 18, 2022
Alex Ballingall

The global Omicron wave is too severe to drop mandatory COVID-19 tests for air travellers arriving in Canada, Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos says, despite calls to do so from top airlines, the country’s largest airport and some health experts concerned about limited testing capacity.

Noting that the number of COVID-19 cases are increasing around the world, Duclos said the surge propelled by the Omicron variant remains “a great concern” both in Canada and internationally. He also stressed that the federal government is responsible for Canada’s borders and is using resources that are separate from those the provinces have for domestic COVID-19 testing.

“At the moment, it’s not going to happen,” Duclos said in French when asked Monday about dropping the testing requirement for people who fly into Canada.

“We are probably, in Canada, not even at the peak of infections,” he said, adding that the situation is also getting worse in other countries.

Earlier Monday, Toronto’s Pearson airport and Canada’s two largest airlines -- Air Canada and WestJet -- published an open letter to Duclos and other government officials, urging them to drop the testing requirement for arriving passengers and shift testing resources to other settings, like schools.

They said Ottawa should test only a random sampling of travellers, and also drop the mandatory isolation period for arriving travellers without COVID-19 symptoms, since they are also required to get a negative molecular test within 72 hours of their flight to Canada.

“Now is the time to put scarce testing resources where Canadians need them most: in our communities and not in our airports,” the letter says.

The government is paying three private companies up to $631 million for border testing services, according to the office of Public Services and Procurement Minister Filomena Tassi. Those contracts include mandatory testing for unvaccinated and vaccinated people without symptoms who fly into Canada from abroad, a requirement Ottawa announced on Nov. 30, just days after the first cases of the highly contagious Omicron variant were reported in South Africa.

But some experts argue the testing requirement makes less sense now that Omicron is so prevalent in Canada that provincial testing regimes can’t keep up with infections. Ontario, for example, decided on Dec. 30 to limit molecular testing to people showing symptoms who are deemed at high risk or who work in high-risk settings.

Some have also pointed to the relatively low positivity rate of incoming air travellers, which stood at around 1.1 per cent for the fully vaccinated and 1.6 per cent for the partially vaccinated and unvaccinated from Nov. 28 to Dec. 25, according to federal data.

Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, said last week that the arrival testing was a “drain” on lab capacity as a whole, but stopped short of calling for it to be dropped.

While Duclos ruled out the possibility of an imminent change to the requirement, he left the door open to revisiting it as the pandemic changes.

“As the situation evolves, obviously, we will keep adjusting our measures in all sorts of ways, including at the border,” he said.