Aid workers say Canada’s Ebola quarantine hinders response, hope it won’t be extended

TORONTO — The night before Lily-Madeleine Seguin was set to book her flight to the Democratic Republic of Congo in late May, the Canadian government announced a three-week quarantine for travellers returning from the Ebola-stricken country.

Seguin, a public health promotion adviser with Oxfam’s global humanitarian team, had all of her final sign-offs and approvals green-lit. Her booster shots were updated.

She was ready to fly out two days later for a two-month deployment when she heard the news. It came as a shock to Seguin, who has been a part of previous Ebola outbreak responses in the DRC, including an 11-month deployment in 2018.

But she never went. There wouldn’t be enough time to quarantine between her return and the beginning of a sabbatical she had scheduled months before.

Now, three months later, the government’s mandatory 21-day quarantine is set to expire on Aug. 29. As the outbreak rages at an unprecedented speed, Seguin said she hopes Canadian officials will reverse course.

“To me, we’re not stepping up in the way that we should be as a country that does have the ability to do it and changing the quarantine regulations is a low-stakes way of being able to do it,” Seguin said.

She is not the only one who feels this way.

Canadian humanitarian aid workers say their ability to respond to the outbreak has been stifled by the country’s long quarantine period, forcing some to stay home or cut their deployments short. They say an extension of the mandatory 21-day quarantine for Canadians and permanent residents returning from the DRC, Uganda or South Sudan could be detrimental to the outbreak response.

The World Health Organization has said this is the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak in history, on track to be the deadliest, with Africa’s top public health agency reporting more than 2,500 deaths out of more than 5,000 infections.

Canada’s government said it’s currently reviewing the restrictions and latest evidence alongside international partners and will announce a decision on next steps before the expiration date next week.

When the measures were announced in May, the approaching FIFA World Cup was pegged as a key reason for the strict rules, aligning with co-hosting countries, the United States and Mexico. Canada’s health minister said at the time that “it’s not a question of science,” but of protecting people from the lasting trauma of past outbreaks.

At least 11 Canadians with highly valuable expertise have had to cancel their assignments with MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders, as of Aug. 20 because of the quarantine measures, the organization says. Twenty-three Canadians in total have been a part of MSF’s Ebola response in the DRC.

Adam Houston, medical policy and advocacy adviser at MSF Canada, said some of those Canadians would have been deployed to other humanitarian efforts in the conflict-ridden region and that the measures have affected more than just the Ebola response.

“This is impacting our ability for Canadians to participate,” Houston said.

Mylene Ratelle, who was hired as a health promotion manager at MSF, said she would have stayed in the DRC for far longer than she did, but she had to come home to quarantine for three weeks before the start of the fall semester.

“I’m very critical about how Canada chose to implement their public health measures,” Ratelle said from her apartment in Montreal, where she was quarantining, back to pandemic-era baking instead of contact tracing in the DRC.

As a professor of public health who has worked for Canada’s public health agency, Ratelle said she was disappointed by the lack of scientific basis for Canada’s strict border measures.

Ebola does not spread through the air or casual contact, but through bodily fluids like blood, vomit and semen. People also generally do not spread the virus before they get sick, which can take two to 21 days after infection.

Roojin Habibi, research director of global health law at the Global Strategy Lab at the University of Ottawa and York University, said Canada’s travel restrictions go against expert guidance from the World Health Organization, which has criticized blanket travel restrictions, and said that they are based on fear, not science.

“To me, it’s quite egregious,” she said.

Habibi said the government has communicated to the public that the risk of Ebola spreading here is very low, but she sees the measures implemented as a way to avoid people saying that not enough was done to protect Canadians.

Karine LeBlanc, a senior communications adviser at Health Canada, said the government is “continually reviewing the measures alongside the latest evidence with international partners and will determine next steps before the existing measures are set to expire.”

LeBlanc says the temporary measures are not intended to eliminate all risk, “but to reduce the likelihood of importation, support early identification of potentially ill travellers, and therefore reduce the risk of potential spread to others in Canada.”

The mandatory quarantine also applies to Canadians returning from South Sudan and Uganda. South Sudan has not reported a case of Ebola in this outbreak. Uganda’s ministry of health declared its outbreak over on July 28, after 20 people were infected, including two deaths.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control advises travellers returning from the DRC or Uganda to self-monitor for symptoms and only quarantine if they had a high-risk exposure, such as direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person or close face-to-face contact with someone coughing, vomiting or bleeding, who has the virus.

Seguin said it’s not that she thinks her presence would have curbed the spread of the outbreak, but that it pains her to see Canada sending this signal to the rest of the world.

The government has committed $8 million to support the fight against the outbreak, but she said it is pennies compared to the more the $110 million of financial assistance during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

“All the decisions that the Canadian government has decided to make over the past few months around the Ebola outbreak, none of them have been very forthright in saying, we understand that this is a global priority and as Canada we’re going to step up to help in the ways that are equal to the capacities that we have in this country.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 22, 2026.

Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.

Hannah Alberga, The Canadian Press