Auditor general Karen Hogan detailed the Public Health Agency of Canada’s lagging efforts to verify travellers complied with two-week mandatory quarantine orders in a new report last week.
The agency beefed up its enforcement compared to May to June 2020, when it was unaware of where 66 per cent of incoming travellers’ cases had landed, a figure that dropped to 37 per cent as of June this year. But the data is nothing to be proud of, said Hogan.
The 34-page report, tabled in Parliament Thursday, cited a shift to collecting travellers’ contact information electronically, as opposed to on paper, as part of the reason behind the improvement.
“The agency’s inability to confirm whether more than a third of travellers complied with quarantine order remains a significant problem,” said Hogan, named to the role in 2020. She released an earlier probe in March looking at pandemic border measures from the year prior, her first such audit.
The recent findings note the agency did not conduct sufficient followup with travellers who did not follow quarantine rules, with officials “unaware” what the outcome was in 59 per cent of cases where travelers were referred to the CBSA as priority offenders from July 2020 to June 2021.
More than 136,000 incoming travellers were referred to law enforcement, categorized at “high risk of non-compliance” with quarantine measures. The previous audit found PHAC did not track the outcome for 83 per cent of its referrals, so while that figure has since dipped, there is a “continued” lack of complete information that makes it difficult to say how effective the measure is at limiting Covid spread, the office said.
Part of that could be sourced to what the AG called a finding of “uneven ticketing,” as not all jurisdictions adopted the ticketing regime under the Contraventions Act, which the agency said in April 2020 it would opt into.
Under the system, PHAC officials can fine non-compliant travelers from $100 to $5,000, but with Alberta, Saskatchewan and the three territories not adopting the regime, quarantine officers in those regions could only refer travellers breaking the rules to law enforcement, who could in turn lay criminal charges.
At the time of the AG’s audit, five such criminal charges had been laid under the Quarantine Act across five jurisdictions, though PHAC did not know how many tickets were doled out in Quebec.
