Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Lewis, for moving this motion. I support it entirely.
We did have one meeting on this. I want to go back to that testimony. We had testimony from CBSA officials that this was a temporary measure. I want to look at that testimony and see whether it was entirely factual. I appreciate following up on this, because ArriveCAN has caused significant problems for the auto industry, for tourism and even for family visitation.
As well, there are concerns over this being a reason to circumvent hiring customs officers. We've seen the loss of customs officers at a number of different facilities and locations, and they have been quite clear as to the stress they've had. In fact, I'm told that some of them were on mandatory overtime this summer because there has been a lack of process in actually hiring and retaining officers. I think that should be part of what we need to do here.
This is one issue on the border particularly, but it's an important issue that needs to be addressed, especially because ArriveCAN was described as something that was related to the pandemic as to its implementation. As we're going through this current stage right now, and from some of the information that we've received, that doesn't seem to be the case; it's now a policy that has existed beyond what it was supposedly intentionally created for. Hopefully, we can get some research done by the clerk or our team as to when the contracts went out for ArriveCAN. I'd be interested to know whether it was an in-house design or whether it was contracted out to a third party. I'd like to find out how the government went about creating the app to begin with, when that took place, who actually created it and what the contract was. It would be nice to have some of that information in front of us, because we're dealing with a particular situation here.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate the committee.