Access Denied

There is a mandatory quarantine period of 14 days upon entering into a new province. How could he quarantine on foot? Is there support available if he was homeless?

So many questions and clearly I was not in a position to answer them. On foot, he passed through the first station and proceeded to the second station within the checkpoint.

The walker ended up speaking with someone from New Brunswick Public Safety for a few minutes. After this, he started walking back towards the Nova Scotia border which is a kilometre away.

What a crazy thing unfolding in front of me. Someone was just denied access to another province after going through an inter-provincial Canadian border. Crazy times for our country. Besides criminals, I never heard of someone being denied access to another province via an inter-provincial checkpoint. A historic moment perhaps?

Watching him walk towards the Nova Scotia border I was curious onto the next steps for him. Will Nova Scotia let him back in? There is no documentation of him leaving Nova Scotia, so what about re-entering?

As he continued on towards Nova Scotia, traffic had started up again.

And all a sudden he was gone. Disappeared. No longer behind the truck. Where did he go? All a sudden I see him behind the mobile trailer (to the right of the Ford vehicle in the above photo) on the other side of the highway, he ended up running into the wooded/high brush area of Fort Beauséjour.

The Public Safety Officer left in his SUV to give chase. I ran across the highway on top of the hill to scan for him. After a half-hour or hour of scanning, the Public Safety officer had no luck. He’s bound to pop up I thought.

The chase was certainly on. A search for someone who is now being searched for because he was denied access crossing a provincial border.

After a couple of hours of waiting for the individual to re-appear, I started to give up hope. At the same time, my editor called and I discussed it with him. After waiting a bit longer, I called it a day.

Whatever happened to this individual I will never know however it was the first time I ever saw someone being denied inter-provincial travel. Let’s hope COVID-19 is over soon so I never have to see it happen again.

Darrel Cole of Amherst News ended up writing up a piece on this story. Amherst News is a Saltwire Network Product. Saltwire is a subscriber to Reuters.

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