3 21 things to watch:
CANADA
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1 Border Restrictions and COVID-19
On March 20, 2020, the United States and Canada restricted cross-border travel to “essential” traffic only for 30 days to slow the spread of COVID-19. Nine months later, these restrictions remain in effect with no strategy in place for phasing them out. Most commercial trucking and rail traffic is unaffected, but the impact on border state economies and quality of life has grown. Each nation’s privacy protections (especially for personal health information) have made the technical challenge of screening border crossings by land, sea, and air more complex. While Canada’s pandemic response has resulted in a rate of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths per million people that is nearly a third of the comparable U.S. rates at the end of 2020, Canada’s limited domestic vaccine production capacity has put the country into a global competition for access. If conditions worsen, Ottawa may seek help from Washington in 2021.
Featured Experts:
www.wilsoncenter.org/canada
Kathryn Byrk Friedman, Global Fellow, Canada Institute
canada@wilsoncenter.org
Christopher Sands, Director, Canada Institute Laurie Trautman, Global Fellow, Canada Institute
facebook.com/CanadaInstitute @CanadaInstitute 202.691.4301 years
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