The U.S. would like to loosen border restrictions. ‘We’re not there yet,’ Justin Trudeau says

OTTAWA — Amid a rising third wave of COVID-19 and public frustration with a slow vaccine rollout in Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dampened expectations that the Canada-U.S. border would reopen anytime soon for travel despite rising vaccination coverage in the U.S.

There are growing calls in American business and political circles — which have some support in Canada — for governments to produce a plan and a timeline for reopening the border.

But on the day when U.S. President Joe Biden said all American adults could be eligible for vaccination within two weeks, Trudeau turned aside questions about whether vaccinations could be a game-changer for reopening the border.

“We’re not there yet,” he told a news conference on Parliament Hill. “We’re in the middle of a third wave that is extremely serious.”

While Trudeau downplayed the possible use of so-called “vaccination passports,” he said Canada would work with international partners including the U.S. to plan how proof of vaccination might be useful, but added that such questions are “not for right away.”

The Canada-U.S. border has been closed to all but essential traffic since March 2020, with travel restrictions extended monthly, most recently to April 21.

Rep. Brian Higgins, a Democrat who co-chairs the northern border caucus and represents a district in the Buffalo region, said in an interview it is time for Canada and the U.S. to recognize that “the vaccination is the game-changer.”

“With vaccines, we do have the upper hand,” he said, even if variants of the coronavirus require yearly inoculations, as some experts suggest.

Higgins, who heads the U.S. section of a cross-border group of legislators, said governments should spell out a plan to ease restrictions over the coming months. He said that plan should initially expand the “essential” category of permissible travel to include people who have business dealings, family members or property across the border.

As a first step, Higgins said, travellers in those categories who can prove vaccination should be allowed to cross the border by late May, and a wider opening should be possible by Canada Day, or the July 4 holiday in the U.S. — although he acknowledged that would require wider vaccination in Canada, something he suggested the U.S. should help Canada with.

He said cross-border travellers would still have to adhere to public health measures like masks and physical distancing, but said such a plan is “highly reasonable and it can be done safely and successfully” as a step toward a wider opening of the border.

Maryscott Greenwood, a former U.S. diplomat who heads the Canada-U.S. Business Council, said in an interview that in American business sectors there is “definitely a sense building that it’s time” to plan the border reopening, and that there have been discussions with the U.S. government about what that could look like.

On Tuesday, Biden said every American over 18 would be eligible to be vaccinated by no later than April 19 — “no more confusing rules, no more confusing restrictions.”

The United States are vaccinating their populations at twice the rate Canada is, with more than 32 per cent having received at least a first dose, versus just more than 15 per cent in Canada, according to an Oxford University tracker.

And in sheer volume of doses, the difference is staggering. The U.S. has administered more than 167 million shots so far, while Canada had administered 6.69 million doses as of Tuesday.

Trudeau refused to criticize provinces and territories Tuesday for delays in their vaccine rollouts. He offered more federal help to help speed things along after announcing payment of the last $700 million of the federal government’s $19-billion Safe Restart fund for provinces, and said Ottawa was ready to do more.

“The federal government has paid for the vaccines and we’re happy to continue to help with more resources as needed, because this is no time to go back and forth over who should pay for what,” Trudeau said. “This is the time to do everything we can together to get as many people vaccinated as soon as possible.”

Trudeau underscored that strict observance of public health guidelines remains key, and when it comes to the border, he said his government would base its decisions “on science at each step” including whether to recognize people who were immunized with vaccines that remain unauthorized in Canada, such as the Chinese or Russian vaccines.

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Asked what metrics would be used to determine when it was safe to ease travel restrictions, Health Minister Patty Hajdu repeatedly said “now is not the time to travel,” and said Ottawa would monitor provinces and territories capacity to manage cases.

Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, suggested a range of factors beyond vaccination could be considered, including infection rates and spread outside Canada’s borders, as well as operational concerns in Canada such as the health system capacity to test, do contact tracing, or quarantine monitoring, or other considerations such as hospitalization or ICU rates.

Liberal MP Wayne Easter, who chairs the Canadian section of the Canada-U.S. interparliamentary group, said several Canadian MPs spoke to about two dozen of their congressional counterparts recently and heard clearly a demand for a plan.

“There’s a view down there that, ‘Look, it’s time to now full steam ahead,’ versus what we see in Canada, which is fear,” Easter said. “We’ve done a good job in this country of instilling fear in people whereas they say, ‘Look, it’s time to start moving.’”