I have spent my entire life traveling between Canada and the United States—or at least I did until a year ago, when the two countries closed the border to so-called nonessential travel in an effort to stem the growing COVID-19 pandemic. I was born in upstate New York, but my family moved to Vancouver when I was a small child. I returned to the United States in the mid-1980s with my new Canadian wife to attend graduate school, and we largely stayed. Since then, I have crossed the border multiple times each year for work, for vacation, and to visit family and friends. Until the lockdown, we frequently made the one-hour drive from our home in the state of Washington to Vancouver every few weeks—including to see our daughter, who is a student there. All that stopped in March of last year.
Like millions of others similarly affected around the world, I’d hoped the closed border would be a temporary measure. But despite all the encouraging progress on the vaccination front, it appears travel restrictions are going to be with us for the foreseeable future. Canada recently announced more extreme measures, including a mandatory hotel quarantine for travelers arriving in the country by air, in an effort to prevent the spread of the new variations of the COVID-19 virus. One of the Biden administration’s first acts was to block all travel to the United States from countries where the new variants have spread, including most of Europe, Brazil, and South Africa.
