Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Nov. 18th, 2025

[Mark Weber]

There was an order in council in 1932 that essentially gave that work over to the RCMP. That was the prohibition era. That's a long time ago. I don't know what the reasoning for that was at the time. Times have changed. We see the provinces organizing different combinations of provincial authorities and park rangers. It seems that everyone is involved in this work except the people who have the responsibility to do it, which is us.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Is alcohol still prohibited in the U.S.? Never mind.

Are you familiar with the 14‑day rule in the safe third country agreement between Canada and the U.S.? I'm not trying to catch you out.

[Mark Weber]

Yes.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Do you think the amendments the government is proposing in Bill C‑12 will change anything? Are they really necessary, since migrants will eventually be subjected to a pre-removal risk assessment anyway?

[Mark Weber]

I think it could. Again, I hate to sound like a broken record, but it depends on the application.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Would the current version of Bill C‑12 improve your members' safety? Would it change anything?

[Mark Weber]

For our members, if it's applied properly and if they're allowed to get back to the work of interdiction rather than facilitation, I think it could be of great help. Again, this is very overall and broad. The devil is in the details. We need to get back to doing those interviews and doing the interdiction that we were doing previously.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Have you talked to your members about Bill C‑12? Are they talking about it among themselves?

[Mark Weber]

Our members are very aware and very involved. Yes, we've put it out there and they're really able to get into the weeds of what needs to be done.

I have no expertise in terms of processing refugee claims. We have people, for example, who've worked at Roxham Road for a long time and know it inside out and backwards.

In my opinion, you always go to the people who do it to find out how to do it well. I think that's part of what's lacking in this process as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

You have 30 seconds.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Could you tell us what your members think, in general, of Bill C‑12? Are they in favour of it or not?

[Mark Weber]

I think it's hope, based on the hiring of 1,000 additional officers. Absolutely.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

Thank you.

Next is Mr. Menegakis for five minutes.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Weber and Ms. Douglas, for appearing before us.

Mr. Weber, you said something powerful in your opening remarks to us. You used the words “reduced security for the sake of expediency.” That's very concerning.

In response to some questions from my colleague Mr. Redekopp, did you say that after someone gets to that initial one-touch system, where they basically pass the biometrics and fill in a few things, they have 45 days to self-administer the rest of the questionnaire and respond?

[Mark Weber]

That's correct.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

How many of those in that period of time were deemed inadmissible?

[Mark Weber]

Inadmissibility is deemed later on in the process.

Again, our goal at the border is to build the file to be able to identify non-genuine claims. Right now, we're kind of relying on people to self-declare that their claim is not genuine.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

You don't have them in front of you, and you can't speak to them. They're just giving you a document that says, “No, I'm not a criminal. I'm a good person and I'm coming into the country, so let me stay in the country.”

[Mark Weber]

Yes.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

This is at a time when CBSA has testified before this committee that it's trying to find 30,000 people in Canada who need to leave the country, who are not found at this time.

I want to touch base with you about one other thing. You mentioned additional resources and getting more people. I looked in the 406-page budget that the government put forth in Parliament for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship to see what's in there for immigration. Very much to my surprise, on page 311—in the one-page document that deals with immigration, despite the massive problems we're having with the file in the country—the very opening line is, “To meet up to 15 per cent in savings targets over three years, [IRCC] is rationalizing programming” and so forth.

How do you see that affecting your members?

[Mark Weber]

Our members are not IRCC. I have a lot of sympathy, and our members do too, for what they're going through. With the one-touch system I described, essentially when claimants complete that, it goes directly to IRCC. That's out of our hands. They're given all that additional work while we talk about massive cuts.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

You're doing really important work, and your work is ensuring that the people who come into this country are safe to walk around in our communities. You're being hampered because you don't have the resources to do that. They put in a system that, as you say, reduces security but is more expedient.

Canadians have an expectation that the people who are allowed into the country are safe to walk around in our streets, in our communities, around our schools and around our community centres, so it's shocking that committed officers with conviction—your members—who want to make sure that the border is as safe as possible don't have the right tools to be able to do that.

You also mentioned the morale. I want to ask you about that. How are your members dealing with the strain of having 300,000 pending asylum claims on top of what they're dealing with every day?

[Mark Weber]

Yes, that's a heavy load to carry.

We score last in the public service employee survey. We were last in the last one. Occasionally, we get up to second-to-last, but we're fairly regularly down at the bottom.

I think this is part of it. I think having management culture where management does not come from the ranks and where you have people making decisions who have never worked at the border, have never worn a uniform and don't understand the details of how any of these processes work is a big issue. I think how our accommodated officers are dealt with—

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

You have one minute.

[Mark Weber]

I mentioned it briefly in my opening statement. Currently, we have about 200 accommodated officers. When I say “accommodated”, I mean that they can do almost the full job, except they cannot carry a firearm, because of injury. Some were injured during use-of-force training. The CBSA is having them look at forced medical retirement rather than taking them and using that expertise and that knowledge. We're talking mostly about seasoned officers who would be able to do things like process these claimants rather than have them go through one-touch.

There was a pilot program in Niagara Falls that had accommodated officers do exactly this, and they were able to process faster than one-touch was able to do it—and give the full interview. Those are the kinds of things that we look to the CBSA to work on, to bring us back to interdiction rather than facilitation, and it doesn't. It's easier to treat your employees as numbers, as disposable employees. That's how it's looked at.