Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Madam Chair, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. My name is Mark Weber. I'm the national president of the Customs and Immigration Union, which represents personnel working for the Canada Border Services Agency, the CBSA.
I'll be brief.
Following the recent announcement that the use of the ArriveCAN application will no longer be mandatory, it is hard to convey the relief that border officers across the country must be feeling. While border officers take great pride in their duty to serve the Canadian public, I know with great certainty that none of them imagined that the best use of a trained law enforcement officer would be to provide IT support due to, really, an ill-designed app that failed to take into account the idiosyncrasies at our borders. I've said it before and I'll say it again: From the perspective of border operations, as far as border officers are concerned, the last months have shown that ArriveCAN fails to facilitate cross-border travel while doing very little to address the severe gaps in border security that are plaguing our country.
At the risk of repeating what has been highlighted time and time again, I will say that the implementation of ArriveCAN really follows the same pattern of overreliance on automated technologies that we've seen before with primary inspection kiosks and that we're now starting to see with eGates. It's a misguided approach that senselessly sets aside any security considerations.
What I urge the government and the agency to do now is to turn their attention to the severe deficit in personnel afflicting border services throughout the country. The reality is really bleakāthe agency needs thousands more officers if it wishes to fulfill its mandate. This past summer alone, at some of its busiest land border crossings, the CBSA often had little choice but to choose between properly staffing commercial operations or traveller operations, and that's to say little of what it simply cannot do, which is adequately curb the smuggling of dangerous goods, despite the sustained efforts of its officers.
Ultimately, what the failure of ArriveCAN shows us is that our government must continue to invest in people to best serve people and must reconsider its pursuit of a one-size-fits-all technological panacea.
In conclusion, it's my hope that the union's input will assist the committee in this important work.
I thank you for the opportunity and I look forward to your questions.