No Hotel Quarantine Required for Land Crossings

February 18, 2021 Marsha Mowers

The CBC says travellers are planning to return home to Canada by crossing at a land border in order to avoid spending up to $2,000 per person for mandatory hotel quarantines.

The new hotel quarantine laws take effect next Monday, February 22, and require all travellers to be tested on arrival in Canada (in addition to their pre-boarding negative PCR test) and stay in a government-approved hotel for up to three days, while awaiting the results. If they’re positive, they’ll be sent to what’s being called a “government-approved facility” to spend the rest of their mandatory 14-day quarantine. If they test negative for COVID-19, they’ll be sent home to finish their quarantine. They also will be required to do a third “home kit test” during their at-home quarantine.

But those rules apply only to air travellers, not those crossing at land borders. Public Safety Minister Bill Blair explained that having the same requirements for travellers coming by land is too difficult.

“At land borders we have 117 different points of entry and many of those points of entry are located in remote rural areas,” not near hotels or other amenities, he said during a news conference last week. 

That could mean that Canadians coming home or visitors coming into Canada could avoid air travel and hotel quarantines by flying into border cities and crossing by land. It would cost them money to change a plane ticket from, say, Toronto to Buffalo, or from Vancouver to Seattle, but they could avoid a $2,000 airport hotel stay and up to three days of government-ordered takeout food by doing a land crossing.

The hotel quarantine for travellers is not to be confused with the current quarantine rules enacted by then Transport Minister Marc Garneau on January 7. Nor should they be confused with the Ontario provincial requirements put in place by Premier Doug Ford as a bridge to the federal rules. Under those provincial rules, travellers can refuse a test and pay a $750 fine. It’s not clear if they’re to a quarantine facility if they refuse a test.

The hotel quarantine for travellers also should not be confused with the free hotel quarantines in Canada who don’t have a place to quarantine safely, such as a large or multi-family dwelling.

Confused yet? We all are.

We’ve reached out to Public Health Association of Canada a few times and have not gotten clear answers on the new protocols, such as how the home tests administered/results will be verified, what criteria the quarantine hotels need to meet and whether the hotels are closed to the general public (imagine needing to stay in a hotel because your furnace broke and finding out it’s filled with people with COVID?).

We also reached out to Canadian Border Services Agency multiple times, asking how a passenger is able to board a plane to Canada with the wrong test in the first place. Remember, the stories we’re seeing in the news lately aren’t people trying to duck the system – they legitimately got the wrong test type before coming home. The testing they had is accepted in many countries, including the US and Caribbean.

There are many, many questions, and we’re trying to find out what we can.

Meanwhile, the federal government is announcing today the list of government-approved hotels where travellers are required to stay.

An update to follow this afternoon.

About the Author