TORONTO -- The Blue Jays are at a fork in the road as they work to iron out the final details of their return to summer camp on July 1, with Toronto on their left and Dunedin, Fla., on their right.

MLB’s lone Canadian club faces the unique challenge of the Canada-U.S. border and its restrictions, further complicating the organization’s desire to conduct training and the regular season north of the border. On Friday, the Blue Jays still have "no closure" on that front.

• Blue Jays FAQ: Details on the upcoming season

Club president and CEO Mark Shapiro has been working with the federal government, the province of Ontario and the city of Toronto -- first informally, then with a formal proposal nearly one week ago -- to explore that possibility. While the club is dedicated to finding a way to make this work in compliance with public health officials, the realities of Ontario versus Florida are very much at play here. In Ontario on Friday, with a provincial population approaching 15 million, just 111 new positive cases of coronavirus were announced, the lowest total since March 25.

“Certainly there’s more comfort in coming to Toronto and conducting training here in light of the conditions and circumstances here,” Shapiro said, “but if we have to pivot to Florida, then we’ll do so with diligence and attention to detail and do our best to keep players out of harm’s way.”

Shapiro and the Blue Jays began these discussions nearly eight weeks ago, with the initial intention of making their preferences clear to all levels of government while receiving input on how to proceed. Drafts of MLB’s health and safety protocols were shared with government and public health officials, but the formal proposal needed to wait until those final protocols were agreed upon by the league and the MLB Players Association more recently.

Right now, the Blue Jays envision three potential scenarios. One sees them fully in Toronto, the other fully in Dunedin and the third being a “modified structure” hybrid of the two, if the viability of crossing the border were more realistic later in the season. Other locations like the club's Triple-A complex in Buffalo were explored to some extent, but its focus remains on Toronto and its spring home of Dunedin.

This is being discussed and developed in real time, simply because there is no tried-and-true blueprint for this specific scenario amid a pandemic.

“Sleepless,” is how Shapiro describes the process. “It’s been two months of dealing on a backdrop of uncertainty while having to maintain as much flexibility and being as openminded as humanly possible each day, because there are no set guidelines and there’s no formal process to help navigate what we’re trying to navigate.”

The club is telling players and staff to hold tight for now, but to expect directions on where to travel this weekend. Regardless of whether it’s Toronto or Dunedin, the club is working to take additional health measures to counteract its unique situation.

“If anything, we are going above and beyond the Operations Manual and we’ve created what would be an appendix or an additional plan that would create a modified quarantine for our players,” Shapiro said. “Then if we move to a regular-season scenario, for visiting players, that would be in addition to the MLB protocol.”

Shapiro knows that baseball’s return on this backdrop will be challenging. There will be positive tests when the Blue Jays’ players and staff report to camp, he expects, which he considers to be part of the process of creating a safer, closed environment.

The club is confident in how it'll do this, it just needs to know where it'll do it.

“We who love the game want the game to be part of the process of us slowly moving towards normalcy,” Shapiro said, “providing our fans and sports fans in general with the opportunity to lose themselves within the beauty of the game of baseball for three hours.”