It is a profoundly complicated and blunt process to shut down the border. As you may recall at some point in the beginning of the pandemic, only Canadian citizens were allowed to return home. I had border service officers who were married to U.S. border service officers, in fact, who could not go back home or could not come across with their family members, because they were not Canadian citizens. This was very hard at a personal level for everyone involved in terms of—for lack of better words—the rough justice that was required to manage and contain the spread of the virus.
We did the best we could. We had established criteria. We had to make adjustments all the time. I had a full-time 24-7 border operations centre trying to apply judgment in tricky situations that could not have been anticipated. It was incredibly complicated and stressful. I am proud of the way the agency responded in that, because it was hard on everyone, but, at the end of the day, it was the right thing to do.