Members of the Indo-Canadain community strongly urge the Canadian government to reverse its knee-jerk policy, and to return to a more rational approach to public health and safety.
By Arun Paramekanti, Sept. 8, 2021
The prolonged Canadian government regulation to forbid direct flights from India to Canada, and to completely distrust pre-flight COVID-19 RT-PCR tests carried out in India while trusting test results from any other third country, is a racist policy which places significant burden on Canadian citizens of Indian origin.
When COVID-19 started affecting the Canadian population in March 2020, the Trudeau Government resisted calls for banning flights from China, instead putting in place measures to test arriving passengers and requiring voluntary quarantine.
When European countries, such as Italy, Spain, France, and England were suffering horrific losses of life in the spring and fall of 2020, when no vaccines were in sight, our government continued to permit direct flights to Canada.
To ban travel from India at this stage, when nearly 80 per cent of the eligible Canadian population (76.35 per cent of Canadians aged 12 and older have been fully vaccinated) has been fully vaccinated, and we have far more knowledge of the disease, reeks of racism.
As a Canadian citizen and a professor of physics at the University of Toronto, I am experiencing, first-hand, the detrimental impact of this policy. I had to fly out to India for my father’s emergency surgery last week, but now find myself facing significant barriers to being reunited with my wife and children in Canada, to providing the quality in-person teaching experience which our university students deserve, and to participating in the upcoming federal election.
The article has been edited by the ICO staff for clarity.