International Trade Committee on June 15th, 2022

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

We have Mr. Masse for five minutes, please.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses.

It's interesting that we're dealing with this now during this current pandemic. I had to fight like heck with the union to get our CBSA frontline officers vaccinated. They had been left of...by the department for [Inaudible—Editor]

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Mr. Masse, hold on a second, please. We're having difficulty hearing you.

[The Clerk of the Committee, Ms. Dancella Boyi]

Mr. Masse, your headset is not properly selected. Can I ask you to click on the upward arrow at the mute button? Please let me know what is checked off.

[Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

There is currently no interpretation.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

I'm sorry. I've never had a problem before.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

All right. It's working now. Continue, please.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Apologies and thanks to our witnesses.

I was just mentioning that we had to get our frontline officers vaccinated. They were left off the priority list at the beginning, but it's important that we recognize their safety.

Maybe really quickly to Mr. Vinette, I am concerned that ArriveCAN is going to be made permanent. Has there been discussion about making it a permanent feature for the land border crossings?

[Denis Vinette]

At this time, there has not been. This is purely the vehicle by which we capture the health requirements at the border, so it's tied very closely to the ongoing orders in council.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Okay.

The Privacy Commissioner was consulted for the original ArriveCAN, and when you update it, are you continuing to consult the Privacy Commissioner?

[Denis Vinette]

I would have to double-check in regard to each individual release, but consistently throughout—and I see Marie-Hélène nodding—we have been engaged with them.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Okay.

I just want to make sure, and maybe we can get a follow-up on that just to double-check.

With regard to the Windsor-Detroit crossing, where I am from, the tunnel bus has not operated because.... Actually, I believe it's the only place in the world where we actually have a foreign bus going into the Detroit area—the foreign bus being of course Canadian—to do routes, including, most recently for the Tigers' games and other games and even commuting. It can't operate with ArriveCAN.

Has your department reached out to the City of Windsor, which operates the only bus service we have internationally, to try to support them to be able to use ArriveCAN through their bus system? It's suspended right now because they have to literally police it themselves and the drivers just can't do that.

[Denis Vinette]

I will have to take that one back.

I've had the pleasure of riding that bus to a Tigers' game, so I know what you're talking about, but I'd be happy to bring that back to the committee with a more fulsome answer.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Okay, that would be helpful.

I was over there for the first time last week and there was a two-hour wait. It's not only the congestion that's added. My concern is about the border wait times that have increased now, and right now we're still driving people away because they are afraid of ArriveCAN.

I will go just quickly to Ms. Lévesque.

Has there been a media company as part of the publicity for ArriveCAN, and how much advertising has gone into the States? I'd like to know what we've done to advertise this to the Americans with regard to ArriveCAN.

[Marie-Hélène Lévesque]

I am going to have to get back on the question of the specific company. I'm not familiar with the name of the company. I know we have erected some billboard space on the U.S. side as you approach some of the major border crossings.

We can provide some additional information on the specific locations and companies.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Okay.

It would be interesting, too, to get a comparison. When the western hemisphere travel initiative was brought in, it was devastating to tourism, and we have still not recovered from that. It required a passport to go back and forth to the United States.

I'd be interested to see how robust the American advertising campaign has been and also what's left over to continue that if this is going to continue to be an issue.

Can you at least outline whether or not there has been more than just billboards and how much money has been spent so far on advertising in the U.S.?

[Marie-Hélène Lévesque]

I don't have the exact amount of money that has been spent in the U.S. I will have to take that question back. I'm sorry.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

That's fine. We can get that back for the committee. It would just be interesting to do a comparison.

Last of all, I had a positive response from the Minister of Public Safety yesterday. I have been calling for a safe border task force, a working group that's a management group involving the operators, the tourism industry, logistics teams and others to actively work on being proactive at the border.

Is that something you think the agencies would support?

We used to have that type of an operation before, a number of years ago, but we don't really have it right now. What type of collaboration is taking place, and do you think you'd be open to that collaboration, Mr. Vinette and Ms. Lévesque?

[Denis Vinette]

Yes, absolutely. We've taken as many measures as we can to work with local stakeholders to really promote the ArriveCAN app, the requirements at the border, and to analyze how we can do the passage as safely as possible for the travellers and our folks.

We are heavily engaged right now with the Toronto Airports Authority to deal with some of the challenges there in that complex ecosystem, so I am very happy to support my minister in that effort locally.

Thank you.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Do I have any time left, Madam Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

You have 13 seconds.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

I'll say thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

I want to thank the witnesses for appearing today.

I will suspend briefly so that we can bring on the second panel, please.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I need to make a few comments for the benefit of our second panel. Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. Please click on the microphone icon to activate your mike, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking.

You have interpretation options at the bottom of your screen of either floor, English or French, and I will remind you that your comments go through the chair.

On the second panel, we have with us, from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Mark Agnew, senior vice-president, policy and government relations; from the Customs and Immigration Union, Mark Weber, national president; from Destination Northern Ontario, David MacLachlan, executive director; from the Tourism Industry Association of Canada, Beth Potter, president and chief executive officer; and from Tourism Windsor Essex Pelee Island, Lynnette Bain, vice-president, destination development.

Welcome, all of you. We will start with opening remarks and then proceed with rounds of questions.

Please, Mr. Agnew, would you start us off?

[Mark Agnew, Senior Vice-President, Policy and Government Relations, Canadian Chamber of Commerce]

Chair and honourable members, thank you for having me back again to this committee. It is a pleasure to be here in person to do this for the first time in quite some time. Also, it's a very welcome thing from the chamber's standpoint to have this study being done as the travel season begins to ramp up for the summer.

To say that the pandemic has been a disruption for international travel is certainly an understatement for our members. We've gone through both the decimation of complete travel flows and now to the pendulum swinging the other way with travel ramping up and backlogs being seen at key points of entry, as we've all seen reported in the media.

Executing effective border policies is not optional for us, given the criticality of travel for the economy, whether it's business or tourism. We must get it right to ensure that Canada remains an attractive destination for travellers. Given the long lead-in time for event planning, organizers will take decisions today that will be felt for 12 to 18 months out in the future.

I want to turn to the committee’s main topic of interest: the ArriveCAN app. The Canadian chamber has long been a proponent of digitizing border procedures to support contactless travel. Unfortunately, the ArriveCAN experience has proven difficult at the border for our members and businesses across the country.

The first point to note is the duplications that the app has created. The traveller experience has been complicated by the diffuse places that the same information has to be inputted to by that individual. As someone who has travelled recently outside of the country, it is striking that the information I'm providing is both to the airline as well as through the app in more than one place.

The second point is the data requirements for the app, particularly for tourists from the U.S. who are engaging in day trips. Travellers who would engage in day trip activities simply wouldn’t have things like a Canadian address. This directly impacts border communities, an assessment that we’ve heard from our chambers that are in those towns in those parts of the country.

Third are the concerns with the universal access, which was touched upon in the first panel that this committee heard from. Although I am fortunate enough to have the tech literacy to use the app, there are many travellers—particularly elderly travellers—who, as was stated earlier, do not have that literacy.

In preparing for this committee appearance, I was astounded to read a recent article by the CBC about a company in Maine that has monetized services to Canadians who are going back into New Brunswick by helping them fill out the ArriveCAN app for $5 as a service. Certainly, as the business community, that's not something that we would want to see.

Also, of course, there are difficulties for people whose first languages are not English or French.

You've already heard a bit from the officials about the uptake statistics that the government is seeing for the ArriveCAN app. What I would say, though, just to build on that, is that with regard to the contact time that a border officer is spending with a traveller, certainly that has gone up quite substantially, and border infrastructure wasn't designed for those types of wait times. I think that's another key factor to bear in mind.

This isn’t to say to scrap the app. As I noted a moment ago, digitizing border procedures is vital. We instead must reorient the app to focus on streamlining customs procedures as well as seeing what sorts of manual alternatives may be needed in reserve.

Ultimately, the app is, in large measure, a reflection of our country's border policies. The announcement last week of suspending randomized testing and moving testing out of airports was a welcome development, as was this week's announcement of partially lifting vaccine mandates for travellers.

However, there is certainly more work to be done. For example, the decision to lift outbound vaccination requirements may be welcome, but maintaining it for inbound travel will certainly continue to create pain points, as you have unvaccinated travellers leaving the country but then facing requirements when they come back, and that, of course, as we know, does cause additional time with border officers at points of entry.

With the summer travel season here and the last two seasons being missed, we certainly don’t have the luxury of time to get this right for businesses all across the country.

Thank you for your attention. I look forward to your questions.