OTTAWA - Visitors to Canada from the Czech Republic and Latvia no longer require visas, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Diane Finley announced Wednesday.
The decision to lift the visa requirements, said Finley, was taken as part of Canada's ongoing review of travel requirements for new European Union members.
"We are committed to the free and secure movement of people between the EU and Canada,'' Finley said in a release. "We are also committed to the objective of visa-exempt status for all EU member states.''
The visas, designed to ensure that visitors to Canada return to their countries of origin, still apply to six other eastern European countries that were once part of the former Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc but have since joined the EU.
Visa requirements still apply to travellers from Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and the Slovak Republic.
Those restrictions are causing tension between the European Union and Canada.
Canadians can travel anywhere in the 27-nation EU without a visa, and the EU would like all its 493 million people to enjoy the same privilege in Canada.
The EU had earlier asked Canada to allow at least one more country to enjoy visa-free travel by the end of 2007 and take steps to abolish the visa system for the others in the first half of next year. It had threatened that "appropriate steps could be proposed'' if Canada did not move -- without saying what the EU or its member nations could do.
Last year, Ottawa issued about 8,400 visitors visas to Czech and Latvian travellers; the vast majority -- 7,300 -- were visitors from the Czech Republic.
Canada and the Czechs had mutually abolished visas in October 1996. But a year later, Canada re-imposed visa restrictions on people from the Czech Republic in an attempt to stem an increasing flow of asylum seekers, particularly Gypsies, also known as Roma.
The visa issue is sensitive in new EU member states such as the Czech Republic and Hungary, which feel their citizens are being denied unhindered access to Canada over unjustified immigration fears.
Twelve new countries have joined the EU since 2004. Canada gave Cyprus, Malta, Estonia and Slovenia the same visa-free treatment that western Europeans enjoyed, but demanded visas for visitors from the other eight new EU nations.
Canada was not alone in keeping up the barriers against the new members.
The EU has warned that it was watching a new U.S. bill that would expand the United States' visa waiver program to more European countries.
The current U.S. program allows citizens from most Western European countries and some other parts of the world to enter the country without visas, but excludes many of the newer EU member states.
