Question Period Note: Economic Impacts of COVID-19 on Northern Canadian cruise ships

• The health and safety of all Canadians is our priority.
• We are currently assessing the health risks and economic impacts that COVID-19 may have on the Canadian Arctic cruise industry and on affected communities.
• We understand this will impact the tourism industry in the North.
• The government has announced more than $1 billion dollars for the COVID-19 Response Fund. This will include measures to support businesses and communities affected by the impact of the virus.
• We will continue to keep Canadians informed as the situation evolves.

Background

(Provided by Transport Canada)
Cruise ships represent a very high-risk medium for viral transmission to Canada and Canadians. Cruise ships are essentially floating cities and even without COVID-19, the rapid spread of infections and viruses and the close proximity between passengers makes successful quarantines onboard vessels virtually impossible. As can be seen with the recent quarantine of the Diamond Princess in Japan and the Grand Princess in the United States, it is extremely challenging to prevent and contain an outbreak of COVID-19 on a large cruise ship, despite the best efforts of leading cruise ship operators.

It is clear that cruise ships are presenting acute public health risks to Canadians from COVID 19 in several ways:
1. Very high transmission risk and difficulty in disease containment due to the large numbers of people in close proximity to each other;
2. The large numbers of passengers and crew that routinely embark and disembark in various locations and then travel internationally means the infection from one ship can spread widely quickly; and
3. The very large number of people per ship (often over 4,000) creates massive stress on the local health care resources wherever there is an outbreak – and so far has required very resource-intense repatriations -- which is unsustainable.

Even with deferring the start of the 2020 cruise ship season and other measures being implemented, it is possible that there will be a major outbreak of COVID-19 on a cruise ship to which Canada will need to respond (e.g., a US cruise ship to Alaska off the coast of B.C.). Consequently, the Government will need to work with local partners to develop response plans to address such situations that fulfills our international obligations and mitigates impacts on local health care systems.

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