Doug Ford asks Trudeau to stop all international students from coming to Ontario
OTTAWA-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Ottawa will address a surprise request by Ontario Premier Doug Ford to suspend the arrival of international students into the province.
Trudeau said no other province has requested the measure and so Ottawa will work with Ford to formalize the request and see how it can be met.
And Trudeau appeared to reject another request from Ford to slap a mandatory three-day hotel quarantine order on people crossing into Ontario at four land border entry points.
Trudeau said that, On land borders, as a reminder: Anyone who comes to the U.S. land border has already been tested in the U.S. in the last 3 days. Then, they have to get tested again. And everyone has to quarantine for two weeks, and do another test on day eight. We are enforcing very severe consequences for anyone breaking these rules."
Prior to separate morning news conferences by the prime minister and the premier, who has only been out in public once earlier this week, the Ontario government released a letter asking the federal Liberals to impose stricter requirements at land borders.
The letter does not specifically mention any request of international students, that Trudeau said, came up at a federal-provincial teleconference call Thursday night.
In a letter to their federal counterparts, Ontario's Health Minister Christine Elliott and Solicitor General Sylvia Jones demanded immediate action" at Niagara, Windsor, Sarnia, and Brockville to halt the entry of variant cases, and they reiterated an earlier demand this week for pre-departure COVID-19 testing for domestic flights."
Elliott and Jones cited weeks of news reports showing international travellers bypassing the airport measures by driving or walking across the U.S.-Canada land border, and demanded that Ottawa impose obligatory quarantine measures at federally-designated hotels for them.
These reports are deeply troubling and further illustrate the extreme risk that inadequate border measures pose in the face of deadly COVID-19 variants," the letter states.
In the past two weeks, over 150,000 people - not including essential commercial truckers - have crossed Canada's land borders. This includes dozens of individuals who crossed between April 24, and April 26, 2021, after travelling from countries where direct flights to Canada are currently banned. This is not just an Ontario problem - it is a Canada-wide problem."
Tonda MacCharles is an Ottawa-based reporter covering federal politics for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @tondamacc