The Canadian Travel and Tourism Roundtable wants the federal government to get rid of all COVID-19 restrictions at airports.
Monette Pasher is with the Canadian Airports Council and says the restrictions are unnecessary because there a lot of duplication and it results in huge backlogs.
“We should be able to facilitate the volumes that we have right now,” suggests Pasher.
“We’re only at 70 percent so it really is coming back to these public health requirements for international travel at our border.”
Pasher says they have set a target date of June 15th to get rid of the restrictions, even though the federal government extended the international border measures to the end of this month.
“Every day matters. We need to save our summer and we need to be able to facilitate smooth travel into our country in order to impact jobs and have people move throughout our country for the tourism season this summer.”
Pasher says Canada is one of the few countries that does screening at airports and that has resulted in huge backlogs of passengers.
These are the recommendations the roundtable is passing onto the federal government:
- Remove vaccination mandates for Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA) and Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) workers;
- Remove the Public Health Agency of Canada’s (PHAC) duplicate health checks and questions through ArriveCan at government checkpoints
- Relocate or remove on-site mandatory random testing from Canada’s airports; and,
- Establish clear service standard benchmarks for security and customs processing of passengers travelling through Canadian airports.
