Evidence of meeting #34 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 44th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was border.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
NDP
Gord Johns NDP Courtenay—Alberni, BC
Mr. Weber, do you have any idea of how much could have been saved by developing this capacity in-house rather than contracting out the development of this app?
National President, Customs and Immigration Union
I don't. Again, we were not consulted on any part of this process. At no point were we or anyone working at the front line asked how this should be done, sourced or put together.
NDP
Gord Johns NDP Courtenay—Alberni, BC
Do you see this as a systemic issue at the CBSA, where we see inflated contracts going to outside companies when they could be developed internally? Maybe you could speak about what needs to be done to ensure we can deliver services like this in-house and to make sure we're supporting unionized workers or hiring more unionized workers.
National President, Customs and Immigration Union
Thank you.
That's something that we do support. Right now, we do need other kinds of technology and other kinds of improvements at our borders. We have borders operating with no X-ray machines. We have marine ports with no boats. The situation in a lot of our ports of entry is dire.
As I said earlier, we need a lot more frontline officers than we currently have. We would estimate between 2,000 and 3,000.
When we look at things like ArriveCAN, I mean, you're almost putting up the wallpaper before you've built the foundation. Our foundation really needs a lot of work, and that foundation is the officers who work the border.
NDP
Gord Johns NDP Courtenay—Alberni, BC
Within CBSA, how can we ensure that IT specialists are being hired as part of the union that works for the government and not hired on contract?
National President, Customs and Immigration Union
That's something that I hope the CBSA will look at. It's something that we encourage and push for. Again, we're talking about IT specifically here, but other than IT, when you look at figures like $54 million, I think that could have done a lot more good than what was done with the ArriveCAN app, which really hasn't done much for us. It hasn't done anything for border security, and it has done nothing to speed up processing times at our borders.
NDP
Gord Johns NDP Courtenay—Alberni, BC
Speaking to that, how far could $54 million go in addressing the staff issues at CBSA that we're experiencing right now, never mind the staffing shortages in terms of predating the pandemic? You can also speak about that issue. Can you comment on how many officers are actually needed to address the current staffing issues?
National President, Customs and Immigration Union
Across the entire country, we estimate between 2,000 and 3,000. If we're looking at a figure like $54 million, by our rough math we could probably hire about 500 additional officers with that, which would be a really good start right now. One of the other difficulties we have is that the one college that we do training at can graduate only just under 600 people a year, which really just barely covers attrition. We don't have any ability right now to get those numbers up to what they need to be.
NDP
Gord Johns NDP Courtenay—Alberni, BC
How is the morale in the union when they hear that $54 million was spent on an app and 500 more officers could have been hired instead?
National President, Customs and Immigration Union
The morale is really low. For every port that I go to visit as a union president, you would think that one of the first things that would come up is the topic of union issues, labour issues—we currently have no contract—and I can tell you that, for the members I speak with across the country, the first thing they say is, “We need more people because we cannot do our jobs anymore.” We have ports operating on almost unlimited overtime. This is not sustainable.
NDP
Gord Johns NDP Courtenay—Alberni, BC
After the launch of the app, can you describe the experience that frontline officers had with it?
National President, Customs and Immigration Union
It was extremely negative. We have a really hard time understanding why all of these questions and this app were implemented the way they were. All those questions were included in the app, when all we were doing at the border was verifying if someone was vaccinated. That could have been done simply by having a traveller show you their phone. As far as we know, no contact tracing was being done.
It was a long-drawn-out process that a lot of people had difficulty completing. At the border, short-staffed as we are, rather than doing everything we could to fulfill our mandate and keep the border safe, we spent almost all of our time acting as IT consultants and helping people complete the application.
NDP
Gord Johns NDP Courtenay—Alberni, BC
That's unreal. Do you have comments about CBSA's use of technology in general? Has the focus been on improving working conditions for officers and for travellers' experience, or do you see technology and automation being used primarily as a cost-cutting measure, which we clearly haven't seen here?
National President, Customs and Immigration Union
It's absolutely being used as a cost-cutting measure. No piece of technology will speak to a child to ensure they're travelling with the adult they should be travelling with. They're not going to find the synthetic opioids that they want to keep out of Canada. They're not going to find the guns that are being smuggled into Canada. We need people to do all of these things.
It's not the first time that we see these kinds of band-aid solutions with technology. It's the same principle that was applied when ABC machines were put into airports, when PIK machines were put in and eGates and with remote reporting that we can't attend.... ArriveCAN is just another one of those. They really provide the worst for both worlds, in that they not only reduce security but they also slow things down.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
Mr. Weber, I'm afraid that's our time for Mr. Johns.
We're going to move to Mr. Barrett for five minutes, please.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Thanks, Mr. Chair.
I would like to circle back to that initial phone call. Based on your staff size—and we have 100% of the staff here—one of you gentlemen took that call from the government. I'm just very curious as to who was on the line and what their position was. That's critical information.
Partner, GCstrategies
Again, I don't have that information right now.
As I mentioned previously, we were already engaged and had been for a year prior to the pandemic where we were providing similar services to the CBSA. Whether it was a phone call or a conversation, they were engaged. They saw the team we had. They saw that it was a similar skill set. They were available. They were Canadian-cleared. That's how it was—
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Okay. You have undertaken to provide that name to us. Is that correct?
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Thank you.
On your website, there are several endorsements from unattributed senior federal public servants. They are quite glowing, to your credit. They include a senior executive with the Government of Canada, a VP of cloud services at a major crown corporation, a chief information officer for the Government of Canada, an assistant deputy minister at the Government of Canada, and a chief data officer from the public sector.
Do you know who those officials are?