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.