ACTA Joins Call For Changes

ACTA is joining the industry’s call for the federal government to lift the mandatory arrival testing and quarantine requirement for fully-vaccinated, asymptomatic travellers so that those tests can be used to support Canada’s domestic testing needs.

Wendy Paradis, president of ACTA, said that: “It is important that the Government of Canada remove these temporary measures – as well as others introduced over the past two years– in a timely manner based on science, data and information gathered globally.”

Nationally, provinces are experiencing significant shortages of molecular testing. Sick Canadians are increasingly unable to access this gold-standard tool.

Said Paradis: “It does not make sense to use these precious resources to test arriving passengers, who are already fully-vaccinated and who already have negative molecular tests prior to departure.”

ACTA’s president continued: “The mandatory arrival testing should be lifted in order to divert urgently needed testing resources back to communities to support sick Canadians.”

In response to the Omicron variant of concern, the Canadian government introduced mandatory molecular COVID-19 testing for all passengers arriving from any country other than the US.

Further, international travellers must quarantine until a negative result is received from the arrival test, which can now take well over a week at the moment due to backlogs.

Paradis pointed out that: “This is a significant barrier to travel, especially as testing systems are strained and delays in returning arrival test results occur. We join in the growing appeals to stop mandatory arrival testing and quarantine requirements.”

Several medical experts are calling for the arrival testing to be stopped, along with several prominent media outlets.

Go to www.acta.ca for more.