Pakistan asks Canada to reconsider ban on flights

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Saturday urged the Canadian government to reconsider its recent decision to impose a ban on all passenger flights from Pakistan for 30 days.

Pakistani High Commissioner to Canada Raza Bashir Tarar, in a letter to Canadian Minister of Transport Omar Alghabra, told Ottawa that Pakistan, like all other countries, had been facing the epidemic but it had managed it well due to its strategy of smart lockdowns.

Keeping with this, Pakistan’s COVID related positive cases were 5,870 on Friday but in the Canadian announcement, Pakistan was bracketed with a country that had recorded 332,503 cases on the same day.

The high commissioner noted that there had been no new variant of COVID-19 developed in Pakistan and yet the Canadian media had quoted Health Minister Patty Hajdu as having said that “1.8% cases detected so far are in travellers, but that eliminating direct travels from both India and Pakistan is intended to give health officials time to sequence and better understand the variant first detected in India”.

Tarar said the decision lacked a understanding of the dynamics in South Asia as “it ignores the fact that both trains and flights are not operational between the two countries … so the ban on flights from Pakistan because a new variant has developed in another country whose population has no possibility of contact with Pakistan, defies logic”. He instead suggested the Canadian government to see the test results of Pakistani passengers coming to Canada 72 hours before taking the flight. He assured the minister that Pakistan’s testing mechanism was very robust and Pakistan International Airlines only accepted results from the best and well-reputed laboratories and matched them with the barcode on every result sheet. In view of all this, he said the Canadian government should reconsider its decision and restart the passenger flights from Pakistan at the earliest.