OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says starting next week, anyone arriving in Canada by land will also need to show a recent negative COVID-19 test.
Trudeau says the new measure will kick in Feb. 15, the latest move to keep COVID-19 from spreading within Canada from people who travelled outside it.
That is particularly relevant with multiple, more contagious variants of the novel coronavirus now circling, many of them already within Canada. The government began requiring all people arriving in Canada by air to show a negative PCR-based COVID-19 test in early January.
But more people are coming into the country in a vehicle than on an airplane.
The latest statistics from the Canada Border Services Agency show that since the end of March 2.9 million people, excluding truck drivers, entered through a land border crossing, while 2.4 million arrived by airplane.Trudeau said the federal government cannot prevent Canadians from returning to the country at a land border, even without a test, but if they don’t have the required test they can be fined up to $3,000.
Monday will also mark the start of a new plan for how many doses those vaccinating people against COVID-19 can get out of a single vial from Pfizer-BioNTech.
Dr. Supriya Sharma, the chief medical adviser at Health Canada, says that after a review, the regulatory team agrees with the companies that each vial of their vaccine contains six doses, rather than five.
”Based on its assessment, Health Canada has determined that each vial will reliably contain six doses of vaccine plus the sufficient overfill volume when proper technique is used,” Sharma said Tuesday.
The change means Pfizer will fulfil its contract to ship four million doses to Canada by March by sending fewer vials.
Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin, the military commander overseeing Ottawa’s vaccine distribution program, says next week Canada will get the same number of vials it was expecting, but instead of Pfizer saying those 67,275 vials contained about 336,000 doses, they will count them as 400,000 doses.
The week after that, Canada will get 79,170 vials, which will now be counted as 475,000 doses instead of the previous 395,850 doses.
Source: ctvnews.ca
Wednesday, May 13, 2026
