Canada, U.S. should manage COVID-19 risk next time instead of closing border: report
Global News
A task force assembled by the D.C.-based Wilson Center concluded in its final report that closing the border entirely to non-essential travel likely did as much harm as good.
When, not if, the next pandemic strikes, Canada and the United States need to work more closely together on a mutual, integrated strategy for managing risk at the shared border, rather than trying to shut it down entirely, a new report says.
A task force assembled by the D.C.-based Wilson Center, which included former Quebec premier Jean Charest and former Canadian justice minister Anne McLellan, concluded in its final report that closing the border entirely to non-essential travel likely did as much harm as good.
Next time — and there will be a next time, the panel warns — a plan to mitigate risk rather than trying to reduce it to zero would ultimately be a better solution, its members said Friday.
“A lot of people personally suffered through this period ? there was a very high cost on a personal level that can’t be measured, but it was real,” Charest said during the virtual launch of the final report.
“If only for that reason, we believe governments would be well-advised to look at more of a risk management approach.”
The panel also included former Washington governor Christine Gregoire and James Douglas, the former governor of Vermont, both of them from border states where managing the shared frontier is a more pressing priority than it might be in other parts of the country.
The panel also found that despite the lived experience of similar public health crises in the past, such as the SARS outbreak in Toronto in 2003 or the H1N1 swine flu pandemic of 2009, neither country seemed to apply the lessons they had already learned.
And despite public pronouncements of a mutual, bilateral plan when the COVID-19 border restrictions were first imposed in March 2020, Canada and the U.S. didn’t actually work together on the strategy as closely as was believed, Charest added.
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