Leslyn Lewis Says As Prime Minister She Will Scrap ArriveCAN Medical Tracking App

Today in an email to Conservative Party members, Haldimand-Norfolk MP and leadership candidate Dr. Leslyn Lewis pledged that if she becomes prime minister she would scrap the ArriveCAN medical tracking app Justin Trudeau’s government put in place. 

ArriveCAN has been highly controversial for being the app the federal government has been using to verify Canadian’s vaccine status to allow them to come back into Canada from abroad.

Dr. Lewis in her email stated:

I believe the Liberal government’s approach to travel in this country is an unscientific, administrative nightmare.

If you’ve traveled out of the country in the past two years, you likely used the Government of Canada’s ArriveCAN app.

If you didn’t, you would have been potentially threatened with additional quarantine time, fines, or – according the government’s own words on their website – “enforcement action”.

For the unvaccinated who travel abroad and come back to Canada, they still must quarantine for two weeks, and the ArriveCAN app has been used to track their movement. Unvaccinated Canadians who leave their homes during their quarantine will receive a phone call from a government official inquiring why they left their home, despite no evidence they are sick with anything. 

This is doubly ridiculous when you consider the fact that unvaccinated Canadians still have to pass a PCR test 24 hours before they board a plane, where they still must wear a mask the entire trip despite verifiably being the least likely to pass COVID-19 to anyone on the flight.

Dr. Lewis later in her email declares that:

Today I’m stating that as Opposition Leader I will press the government to shut ArriveCAN down.

And if they won’t, then as Prime Minister, I will end it.

This is definitely an issue in this CPC leadership race that no candidate should neglect to speak out on. ArriveCAN absolutely is a great tool for the Liberals to use to implement a larger scale Digital ID system and by keeping around and not pushing on the Liberals to end it, surveillance of Canadians will become normalized which could easily lead to dangerous infringement of civil liberties.

Hopefully, as the campaign moves forward Dr. Leslyn Lewis will put ending ArriveCAN in the forefront of her campaign and push back on the Liberals in Parliment’s question period over their use of the app.