Canada won’t be rushed into reopening its border with the United States to non-essential travel, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Monday as new COVID-19 case counts continued to drop in much of the country.
On both sides of the Canada-U.S., border, calls for a reopening plan are intensifying as vaccine coverage has picked up and coronavirus caseloads are dropping, according to CTV News Canada.
Last week, the Biden White House said it had not decided on how or when to reopen the world’s longest international border, but business groups and lawmakers are voicing their demands that both countries come up with a plan.
According to Global News, on May 24, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said she was not aware that any decisions had been made about the border beyond last week’s news that the restrictions, which have been in place since March 2020, would be extended to June 21.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, speaking at a news conference on Monday, said that while many people are eager to see the border reopen, any easing of restrictions needs to be done carefully and with Canadians’ safety in mind.
“We’re on the right path, but we’ll make our decisions based on the interests of Canadians and not based on what other countries want,” he told a news conference in Ottawa.
Trudeau suggested that 75 percent of Canadians need to be vaccinated and COVID-19 cases need to continue to drop before the government would consider reopening the bortder.
We all want to reopen, we all want to go back to travelling to see friends, take vacations, go on trips,” he said. “But we don’t want to have to close again, tighten up again because there’s another wave.”
As of May 19, the percentage of those Canadians 12 and older who have received at least one dose of a vaccine stands at 23,987,002, or 57.56 percent of the population. The number of people receiving their second dose of vaccine, making them fully vaccinated stands at 2,110,202, or 5.36 percent of the population.
Trudeau’s words came as Ontario and Quebec reported their lowest numbers of new COVID-19 infections in months. Quebec reported fewer than 300 new COVID-19 cases for the first time since mid-September, with 276 new infections and one more death attributed to the novel coronavirus.
According to Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 data, Canada has reported 1,389,328 confirmed coronavirus cases and 25,528 deaths.
