Over the weekend, the federal government quietly revealed it had relaxed the rules for the use of ArriveCAN to enter Canada.
Now, fully vaccinated Canadians arriving at a land border crossing can be granted a one-time exemption from fines or mandatory quarantine if they “unknowingly fail” to submit all required documentation through the ArriveCAN app. They still have to prove full vaccination.
According to the CBSA, the quiet exemption was also extended to fully vaccinated non-Canadian land arrivals on 29JUL.
But the exemption does not apparently apply to air arrivals, or to travellers with a “history of non-compliance at the border.” And the use of the ArriveCAN app is still mandatory for all travellers crossing the border.
“The exemption is in place to make travellers aware of the requirement to complete their reporting in ArriveCan,” CBSA spokeswoman Rebecca Purdy said in an e-mail to The Globe and Mail.
The under-the-radar changes to the rules come following numerous media reports of travellers hit with huge fines and forced to quarantine as a result of glitches in the app and less tech-savvy travellers failing to complete the in-app process.
The CBSA says the relaxed rules have actually been in place for months.
“As of May 2022, temporary measures have been put in place at the land border for fully vaccinated travellers with a right of entry to provide more flexibly to travellers with no history of non-compliance, who may have been unaware of the requirement to submit their mandatory health information via ArriveCAN,” Purdy said.
The one-time exemption allowance is not reflected on the CBSA’s travel requirements site.
However, the CBSA told CTVNews that over 300,000 travellers have already been granted a one-time exemption since MAY. “We can tell you that from May 24 to August 4, 2022, of the 5,086,187 land border travellers with a right of entry, the one-time exemption was used 308,800 times,” Purdy said.
That means 6 per cent of arrivals in that time were granted an exemption.
There was no explanation about why that exemption was not provided in the case of the reported glitches that landed some travellers with thousands of dollars in fines and quarantine - or why the exemption only applies to those crossing Canada’s land borders.
In the meantime, calls from the travel industry and rights advocates continue for the ArriveCAN app to be dropped altogether, while the federal government asserts its value to collect and track COVID information, as well as its use as a “pre-entry declaration system to digitize border processing” as “part of our ongoing efforts to modernize our border,” according to remarks made by the public safety minister in JUN.
