Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being here today.
Like my colleagues who spoke before me, I was one of the ones who were calling for the scrapping of the app, and for a very long time. Coming from a community that is very close to and borders the United States, across from Michigan, my office was inundated for months and months on a daily basis with dozens of phone calls and emails. Senior citizens were coming into my office in tears, totally distraught because they weren't able to cross the border. They didn't have a smart phone. They didn't have a data plan on a phone. They had already been separated from their loved ones for a couple of years and just wanted life to get back to normal.
This app had devastating impacts on the tourism industry along Lake Huron and also along Mitchell's Bay. I think about Wallaceburg. I think about Mitchell's Bay, Walpole Island, all the way up the St. Clair River through Sarnia and all the way along southern Lake Huron, which I represent.
We didn't have boaters coming in the summertime, as we should have, because the app was a major impediment to their coming across. You don't necessarily have cellphone service out on the lake. People didn't have cellphones, as I said, with data when they were crossing land borders, so there was a very big series of frustrations for a lot of the people and our businesses in Lambton—Kent—Middlesex.
I witnessed many businesses empty at night. During evenings on the streets of Grand Bend, which would be a booming tourist town full of people from Michigan, much like Niagara Falls, there were no people there.
Mayor, I can sympathize with you given what your city has gone through. I witnessed how border lineups were non-existent coming across through New York from Buffalo to Niagara Falls, and when there were only a few cars, it took an hour because people were having issues with the app. The frustration is real.
I'd like to ask Ms. Potter a question.
We have heard the Canadian Federation of Independent Business say that approximately one in six businesses is considering closing its doors even still because of the devastating impacts of ArriveCAN. I'm just wondering if you could speak to any instances of this, or to what you've seen from small businesses and the impacts of this app and what the cost may have been to the small business industry, which is what most of our tourist towns are made up of—very small independent businesses.