An influential Canadian tourism group is urging Ottawa to loosen testing restrictions and allow arriving passengers to get rapid COVID-19 tests.
The Canadian government currently requires arriving passengers to provide a negative result from a PCR-style COVID test taken within 72 hours of their scheduled departure. But those tests are expensive, and results in some cases are taking longer than 72 hours to be reported. And that makes travel difficult.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson this week said it will no longer require re-departure tests for people travelling to Great Britain. The Guardian reports that Johnson said the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is now “so prevalent (that) these measures have a limited impact on the growth in cases while continuing to pose significant cost to our travel industry”.
Ireland and Israel this week also relaxed travel restrictions.
“As we watch the loosening of other requirements, such as isolation periods, it would seem that loosening of requirements around travel should follow suit,” Beth Potter, president and CEO of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada (TIAC), told The Globe and Mail this week. “We would love to get to the point where you only need to do a rapid test on arrival, then carry on.”
Potter noted that Canada is promising to distribute millions of rapid antigen tests for Canadians to take.
“The question that we ask, and that we don’t have an answer to, is that if we are using rapid tests to mitigate community spread, do we need to rely on PCR tests to mitigate spread by travel,” she asked in the Globe and Mail story.
“We’re desperate as an industry for a science-based, consistent approach to testing that reflects the experiences those in the UK and elsewhere are implementing,”
Christopher Bloore, president and CEO of the Tourism Industry Association of Ontario, said in an email to jimbyerstravel.com. “If we don’t and we continue to have a patchwork of heavy handed restrictions, travellers will simply avoid Canada and our industry will simply never recover.”
Canadian Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said in a media conference today that rapid tests are an “important tool” in fighting COVID-19. But he didn’t address the issue in terms of travelling into Canada.
Meanwhile, the CBC is reporting that Ottawa is still only randomly testing fully vaccinated international travellers upon arrival, despite announcing almost six weeks ago that all travellers entering Canada from outside the U.S. would imminently be required to take a COVID-19 molecular test upon arrival.
