As the global surge of COVID-19 cases reaches new heights every day, pressure is mounting on the Canadian government to do more restrictions at the border to stop the spread of the virus and prohibiting new variants from entering the country.

Calls for swift action are growing as the B.1.617 variant, which was first detected in India, also termed as the ‘double mutant’ has now made its way to Canada.

On Wednesday, British Columbia confirmed thirty-nine cases of the same variant, while Quebec recorded its first case.

The MPs on Thursday unanimously agreed and confirmed that Canada should suspend all the international flights from other countries where COVID-19 outbreaks are raging in the count.

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole called on the Federal Government to temporarily suspend all flights from the hotspot countries on an immediate effect.

He said that this shall buy them the time to develop a clear set of new parameters for identifying the new risks of the emerging variants. They shall then share the information clearly with the Canadians.

Ontario’s government has been pleading with the federal government to ban all flights from India and other hot-spot countries.

However, some experts say that banning international flights isn’t that easy and it is not necessarily the solution to curb the spread of the deadly virus.

Ananya Banerjee, assistant professor at the school of population and global health at McGill University said that she doesn’t think it’s important to ban international travel. Instead, she said that what they need is universal access to the testing and upon arrival to the destinations where people are arriving from India. She feels that by now people have well understood the importance of quarantining and therefore there is no need to ban flights. In reality, Canada and India are very much connected.

Gigi Gronvall said what they need to be doing at this hour is to ramp up the board vaccine efforts and also encourage people to do what they know they should be doing currently when it comes to preventing the virus from spreading.

Dr. Howard Njoo, the Deputy Chief Public Health Officer said on Wednesday that it’s practically impossible to keep the coronavirus variants out of the country and emphasized the necessity of controlling community transmission.

He briefed that the percentage of COVID-19 cases that are being imported to the country is lower than what is generally happening in the country with community transmission.

Therefore, he added that all they need to do is to impose stricter regulations at the border. They need to continue monitoring the situation and slow down the importation. What’s more important is what the people do within the country premises and territories with community transmission.

Currently, all travelers entering Canada are subjected to the coronavirus entry screening regardless of which country they are arriving from and how. Bogoch said that even with all those barriers, there are workarounds.

But it does protect them against a lot of imported cases.