The incidence of new covid infections is dropping rapidly, and our new President gave a speech this evening stating that everybody can be vaccinated by the end of May.
What will it take to convince the Canadian decision-makers that the border can be safely reopened for those with vaccination cards?

It's going to come down to herd immunity which according to Dr. Fauci probably will not happen until the fall at the current rate of vaccinations. And secondly Canada's ability to vaccinate their populace and achieve herd immunity themselves. Unfortunately right now they are lagging in being able to get the vaccine. I just don't see the border being opened for a tourist season even if you've been vaccinated. There is too many unknowns about it yet. Like if a vaccinated person can still spread covid. I just wouldn't plan on it and if by some chance it opens in the fall and you can get a late fall trip than bonus.

In my fantasy land wishful thinking I wish politicians would look at hospitalizations and deaths as their main indicators for when to reopen parts of society such as the US/Canada border. In theory, once the highest risk 10-20% of the population is immune then the deaths should plummet 75%+, making Covid a much less concerning public health problem. At that point I think it would be reasonable to allow restrictions to ease significantly.

What will it really take? I have no clue. Some politicians (rightly or wrongly) seem to prefer doing everything they can to slow the spread of the disease. That inclination and set of incentives I fear will be slow to react, making approaching herd immunity or achieving herd immunity and super low levels of infection for X amount of time a more likely goalpost for our neighbors to the north. But who knows. Predicting the future is tough!

Today Trudeau was quoted on NPR that he thought the border would open in September.

Selfishly I don’t like this...but if everyone in the US will have the opportunity to be vaccinated by May/June. Why not open it up to US residents who are vaccinated or negative COVID test...both?

Can Canadian outfitter/tourism businesses make it an entire whole summer with almost no business again? Either that or they are propping up businesses? But that would be a severe tax strain I would assume.

I also know there is no predicting...I assume if cases drop dramatically, hospitalizations continue to drop as well as deaths then I hope GOvernment officials will re assess sooner than later. On the flip side there is always the possibility things could worsen with new strains for example.

T

And... it sounds like 30% of Americans don’t want to get vaccinated. I don’t know the actual number. I get my first shot tomorrow. Looking forward to not having to be so concerned.

Man it would suck to get Covid now after being so careful for the past 12 months!!

Tom

Eyedocron: "The incidence of new covid infections is dropping rapidly, and our new President gave a speech this evening stating that everybody can be vaccinated by the end of May.
What will it take to convince the Canadian decision-makers that the border can be safely reopened for those with vaccination cards?"

There would seem to be a possibility that by late summer or fall, there will be enough evidence to allow cross-border travel a month post-vaccination. I see the major issue as being that of fraudulent proof of vaccination.

In looking at my card, I can't imagine that it cannot easily be made to identify whomever as being vaccinated. And, there is a reason many/most Canadians cast a wary eye at us - little altruistic sense of community.

Update? from CBC today

Until Canada starts getting its people vaccinated the border will not be opened.

Canada has only vaccinated 500,000 with 2 jabs. Minnesota has done more than all of Canada at 750,000.

I think you need to reword your question, because it appears you assume that It’s just Canada that won’t open the border. The United States government will also need to decide that is safe for Canadians to come here too. We don’t want Canadian people to come here with Covid no more that Canada wants us to go there with Covid. We are not just convincing Canada but also USA to open.

A better wording might be, (What would it take for the Canada/USA border to open for tourism travel?)

I will answer your question. Both countries will need to agree on how, when, or what a border opening will look like. What it will take is the Covid case numbers drop to a point that both countries agree on its safe to travel again. Canada or the USA could open the border today, but it would be meaningless if both don’t open at the same time.

I believe some countries are eager and willing to open up to anyone who can show proof of vaccination or antibodies. There are some already allowing this.

I see an interesting issue happening in some other countries. Say their country vaccination rate is not going well or won't complete until later this year or early next year. Lack of pre-ordered vaccines, distribution issues, etc. Canada and some EU probably fit this category. If this continues, do you think that that gov't will allow foreigners in while their own citizens are not vaccinated and can't travel outside their own country. That policy might highlight their own country issues and upset a lot of their own citizens, thus the gov't officials won't open their border until their own citizens have been vaccinated in a high enough percentage so they too can travel outside their own borders.

A somewhat optimistic view from Canada: Article

A six pack of LaBatt's Blue? :)

The only thing that will work is time, and getting everyone vaccinated.

There is no scientific evidence supporting the notion of a "vaccine passport". The way the vaccine works is it prevents the virus spikes from "sticking" to your body and infecting you. Being vaccinated means that you can't catch the virus, but it doesn't mean you can't carry and give the virus. So what this means is that people who are vaccinated can still have a healthy population of virus living quite happily in their upper respiratory tract, yet be completely unaware of it. In other words - the worst kind of person to further spread the disease.

Quetico is currently closed to backcountry camping, not sure if this just happened yesterday with Doug Ford's implementation of the four-week "shutdown", or if it was preexisting?

Last spring, provincial parks and even Crown Land were closed to backcountry camping, which is ludicrous because there is no better place to isolate! I haven't seen anything about Crown Land being closed, so this won't affect my ice-out canoeing and fishing trip for lakers and specks on Crown Land in May. It didn't affect it last year - we went anyway!

I sure hope Quetico is open by June. Phantoming the park from the north would be tricky, but not impossible.

Cheers from the Great White North, eh?
Pete

Eyedocron: "The incidence of new covid infections is dropping rapidly, and our new President gave a speech this evening stating that everybody can be vaccinated by the end of May.
What will it take to convince the Canadian decision-makers that the border can be safely reopened for those with vaccination cards?"

What you write above is apples and oranges - there is no link between the two.

[rant]

1. We're into a pretty dire third wave here in Ontario, with the variants - especially the UK B.1.1.7 accounting for more than half the new cases. We dropped to a thousand new cases per day by the end of the January Stay-At-Home order, but now we are something like 2400 new cases per day! These variants are more transmissible, and more deadly. They are infecting younger people, too. It might not kill you, but it could change your life forever with respect to all sorts of nasty things that happen to you - loss of smell and taste, reduced lung capacity.

2. Our ICU departments are now MORE full than they have EVER been.

3. There are two types of people in this world: Those who "get it", and those who don't. For the most part, there is no middle ground - you either "get it", or you don't. Anyone who believes that a vaccination card should allow you to travel, or that a "vaccination passport" is a good idea and should let you travel into someone else's country, doesn't get it. Here's why, read on.

CAVEAT: Below is what they THINK, but honestly it is too soon to know if this is actually the case

4. If you have been vaccinated, all this means is that you can't GET the virus. It doesn't mean that you can't CARRY the virus, and it doesn't mean that you can't INFECT others. So while it is safe for you to travel, because you can no longer get sick from the virus - because you have been vaccinated - this doesn't mean that you can't have the virus on you, most likely without knowing it, and then go on to infect others.

How can this be? "I've been vaccinated! Am I not 'safe'?" Read on.

5. How does this vaccine work?

A) Well, to build an immunity to something in your body, you have to develop antibodies against it. Say you're allergic to bee stings, like my dad found out the hard way, and whose 80-plus-years-old ass was saved only by the quick actions of my sister - a doctor who has told me this stuff - when she luckily for him had an epi-pen in her kit.

So ... good ol dad goes to visit the allergist. He gets tiny itty-bitty injections of bee venom on a regular basis, not enough to make him sick, just enough to start building the antibodies. Each time he goes back to the doc - I think it was at least three months, maybe six? - he got a progressively larger injection of the bee venom.

A year or so later, he got stung. Nothing happened. It worked. Perfect. Why isn't this the same with covid?

B) You can't inject someone with the virus itself, because it will make them sick. So if the virus itself isn't in the vaccine, then what is?

C) You've seen images of the virus - it's a spiky ball like those plastic balls you put in your clothes dryer. What they've done is looked at the proteins, RNA, DNA and all that technical stuff I don't understand, in those spikes. The spikes are the receptors, and when the spikes stick to your body, you get sick.

With me so far?

D) So the vaccine replicates the protein chains - the RNA or DNA - in the spikes, only the spikes, not the virus. They put this stuff into the vaccine, and inject it into your body. Now you have a foreign substance in your body, and you start to build antibodies to it. So your body is building antibodies to the spikes, not the virus itself. Only the spikes.

E) What this means is, you inhale the virus [transmissibility through surface contact is virtually impossible, did you know that this has now been proved for quite some time?] and now this virus that you have inhaled cannot "stick" to your body, and infect you. So you're immune to the spikes.

F) Meanwhile, you could well be a vaccinated asymptomatic carrier! The virus can be alive and well in your upper respiratory tract, and now you travel to Canada or Europe or someplace else, and what happens?

G) Maybe you have some of this virus in your nose, and don't know it? Maybe you think you don't need to wear your mask anymore because you can't get sick [true] yet you think because you can't get sick, you can't get anyone else sick [not true].

So now that you understand how this stuff works, do you think any government would allow a vaccinated person free travel inside of their country, until such time as everyone in that country had finally been vaccinated?

The problem in Canada is that our vaccine rollout is slow! I think one of the problems is that the politicians made contracts with the vaccine suppliers, but didn't stipulate a timeframe for delivery! Only 11% of all Canadians have received even their FIRST dose! That's how slow it is up here.

More vaccine is coming, but slowly.

I'm age 61 - currently we are vaccinated folks 68 and older with Pfizer and Moderna. The age bracket of 68 is working its way down.

We're getting a bunch of AstraZeneca coming in, which will be distributed by 700 pharmacies in the province. That vaccine has gotten a bad rap, but for the wrong reason. AZ - that's pronounced "Ay-Zed," eh? has caused blood clots in a statistically microscopic amount of recipients, like maybe one in a million? Mostly younger women. So strangely, this has been blown out of proportion, and for whatever reason they recommend it be given only to people between 55 and 64 [that's me]. You are thousands of times more likely to die from covid than you are from the Ay-Zed vaccine, yet vaccine hesitancy remains, amongst those who don't get it. Anyone who gets it will grab a vaccine as fast as they can.

The problem with Ay-Zed is that its efficacy rate is only 60-something-% compared to 95% with Moderna and Pfizer, Incidentally, 95% efficacy is phenomenally high for a vaccine, and far better than they ever had imagined ahead of time.

So ..... I'm registered with the pharmacy for Ay-Zed. I figured up until about two days ago that "half of somethin' is better than all of nothin'..." and I would grab the AstraZeneca in a heartbeat. I'm any number of orders of magnitude more likely to die in a traffic accident or from covid than I am to die of a bloodclot, so bring it on, man!

Except .... I'd only be 62% protected. Hmmm ... should I wait and see how long it takes for the Moderna-Pfizer age bracket to drop from 68 to 61. Or maybe I'm considered 62 cuz that's how old I am this year? Geez.....

Meanwhile, tourism in Canada is about to be without tourists for the second year running. If yous guys have been talking to your friends who operate the fishing lodges and fly-in services, you know how desperate things are for them. Everyone in Canada wants the Merricans up here, because yous guys inject so many of your Might Yanqui Dollahs into our economy, not to mention kicking the snot out of our Loonie, and the sooner you guys are back, the quicker our economy will come back to life.

The original poster asked, "what will it take for the Canadian government to open the border to tourism?"

The answer, I believe, is for the majority of Canadians to be vaccinated and hence achieve herd immunity for the whole country. Unless of course it is proved that vaccinated people can't carry the virus after all. Time and research will tell.

[/rant]

There actually is evidence that once vaccinated, there is a good chance you can not carry and spread it. Google and there are several studies and more in process that suggest this and may prove it. Its never been a belief that immune people could carry it, only that we were not sure they couldn't. Just like if having and recovering gave you immunity. Cann't know for sure it did, but no evidence it doesn't. And I don't consider the 1 in a million confirmed cases of reinfection a serious concern at all.

So just as we made vaccine before it was tested to have it, lets get a vaccine passport worked out. NY has. Excelsior Pass. I have one.

^^ interesting....

It's no problem for me - a Canadian citizen, but also a Merrican - to come to the You-Ess any time. The problem is the mandatory hotel-stay quarantine when you get home, to the tune of $2000! It's a punishment tax for travelling.

Only the land borders are closed to Canadians entering the states - we have always been allowed to fly in. I was in Yosemite last fall for the entire big wall climbing season. Due to covid and forest fires, we were at times the only team on all of El Capitan!

Here's the latest on the above, hot off the presses in Canada today:

Can vaccinated people spread COVID-19? Data too limited, Health Canada says

With any luck, I might eventually have to eat my words above. ;)

So, as I suggested, since immunity may mean you're not likely to spread it, lets get to work on the vaccination passport.

IMHO, it seems any of the vaccines just about prevents hospitalizations and deaths 100%.

Not very promising news... Ontario 4 week shutdown

Savage Voyageur: "Not very promising news... Ontario 4 week shutdown "

Yep...depressing

“In other global headlines:

In Canada, the P1 SARS-CoV-2 variant is spreading rapidly in British Columbia and causing what is thought to be the largest known outbreak of the virus outside of Brazil, according to the Globe and Mail. The report said many of the cases are in younger adults and that the spread of the virus forced a ski resort in Whistler to close.

In another Canadian development, Ontario officials ordered the province's third lockdown, triggered by rising cases and hospitalizations.“

Savage Voyageur: "Not very promising news... Ontario 4 week shutdown "

And that.... is the final nail of 2021 for the Q

Already April and it’s worse as ever north of the border.

Tom

As much as I feel bad for those not able to make a Quetico trip I feel worse for those who live in Canada and now are seeing their parks shut down for at least four weeks.

We are no better in the US just luckier we were able to get a jump on vaccinations so the fourth wave is not quite as spectacular ( if that is the right word) And we can use our various parks

And the border opening is a joint decision between both countries. No one needs convincing.

yellowcanoe: "
We are no better in the US just luckier we were able to get a jump on vaccinations so the fourth wave is not quite as spectacular ( if that is the right word) And we can use our various parks."

Obviously time will tell, but I seriously doubt we’ll have any significant or dramatic fourth wave in the US. Almost 1/3 of the population in the US has received at least one dose and 1/6 of the population has received two doses. Add to that the population who has already had some variant of the virus, and you get a lot more friction to the virus spreading than existed before.

Reading your post again tells me this may be a minor quibble, but I’m pretty optimistic on the course of the pandemic in the US and I feel like a bit of optimism and glass half full thinking is beneficial, especially as we likely won’t get to paddle the Q again this year.

yellowcanoe: "As much as I feel bad for those not able to make a Quetico trip I feel worse for those who live in Canada and now are seeing their parks shut down for at least four weeks.


We are no better in the US just luckier we were able to get a jump on vaccinations so the fourth wave is not quite as spectacular ( if that is the right word) And we can use our various parks

And the border opening is a joint decision between both countries. No one needs convincing."

From my perspective what the US has achieved so far is an enormous achievement that had nothing to do with luck. Credit where credit is due.

About the parks...just to put it in perspective, nobody really starts camping up here until at least May. It's too cold and sometimes there's still ice on the lakes. Saying the parks are closed now doesn't really affect very many people at all. Closing the parks is really just a way to discourage city folks from traveling. They will likely be open as usual.

cburton103: "...but I’m pretty optimistic on the course of the pandemic in the US and I feel like a bit of optimism and glass half full thinking is beneficial, especially as we likely won’t get to paddle the Q again this year."

+1!

timatkn: "

Savage Voyageur: "Not very promising news... Ontario 4 week shutdown "

Yep...depressing


“In other global headlines:


In Canada, the P1 SARS-CoV-2 variant is spreading rapidly in British Columbia and causing what is thought to be the largest known outbreak of the virus outside of Brazil, according to the Globe and Mail. The report said many of the cases are in younger adults and that the spread of the virus forced a ski resort in Whistler to close.


In another Canadian development, Ontario officials ordered the province's third lockdown, triggered by rising cases and hospitalizations.“


"

Until a majority of the people decide to not let their fear of dying stop them from living, this will not end.

Wharfrat63: "
Until a majority of the people decide to not let their fear of dying stop them from living, this will not end. "

It's not a "mind over matter" kind of pandemic. The virus doesn't care what people think and fear.