International Trade Committee on Oct. 4th, 2022

[The Chair (Hon. Judy A. Sgro (Humber River—Black Creek, Lib.)), Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I call the meeting to order.

This is meeting number 28 of the Standing Committee on International Trade. Today’s meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the House order of June 23, 2022. Members are attending in person in the room, and remotely using the Zoom application.

I would like to make a few comments for the benefit of the witnesses and members, which I have to repeat every single meeting.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. When speaking, please speak slowly and clearly. For those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mike, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking.

With regard to interpretation, for those on Zoom, you have the choice at the bottom of your screen of floor, English, or French. For those in the room, you can use the earpiece and select your desired channel.

As a reminder, all comments should be addressed through the chair. For members in the room, if you wish to speak, please raise your hand. For members on Zoom, please use the “raise hand” function. The clerk and I will manage the speaking order as best we can, and we appreciate your patience and understanding in this regard. Should any technical challenges arise, please advise me. We will suspend for a few minutes to ensure that all members can participate fully.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on June 6, 2022, the committee is beginning its study on potential impacts of the ArriveCAN application on certain Canadian sectors.

We have with us today Zain Chagla, as an individual, by video conference. From the Canadian Airports Council, we have Monette Pasher, president. From the City of Niagara Falls, we have Mayor Jim Diodati. From the Tourism Industry Association of Canada, we have Beth Potter, president and chief executive officer. Finally, from the Vancouver Airport Authority, we have Trevor Boudreau, manager of government relations.

Welcome to you all, and thank you very much for taking time out of your busy schedules to join us in person and by video conference.

Dr. Chagla, I invite you to make an opening statement of up to five minutes, please.

[Dr. Zain Chagla, As an Individual]

Hello, everyone, and good morning. Thanks for allowing me to appear as a witness for the Standing Committee on International Trade's study of the potential impacts of the ArriveCAN application on certain Canadian sectors.

My name is Zain Chagla. I'm an infectious disease physician, medical director of infection control at St. Joseph's and an associate professor at McMaster University, both in Hamilton, Ontario.

Throughout the pandemic, I've worked with COVID-19 infection control, vaccinations, therapeutics, local epidemiology, clinical trials and public education. I'm a frontline physician and still see up to 50 patients a week with COVID-19 to offer them early therapy.

Today's meeting focuses on the impact of ArriveCAN. My focus today is not on the application per se, but why the measures instilled in ArriveCAN were needed and when the need for them started to decrease. This is important because the need for the application was predicated on the need for certain travel measures throughout the pandemic.

Canada has used several travel measures, including pre- and post-arrival testing, quarantine of various groups and proof of vaccination when vaccinations became available. At the beginning of the pandemic, it was increasingly apparent that international travel was leading to ongoing transmission within Canada, whether it was through international flights or the land border with the United States. In the first year of the pandemic, with fairly limited options to reduce transmission, the subsequent health care utilization and the background of ongoing local restrictions to limit transmission, the use of these travel measures did make sense. However, following the introduction of vaccinations, the data suggested a marked reduction in transmission and infection and a significant decrease in severe complications in vaccinated individuals, marking a time when the long-term sustainability of vaccinations and eventual therapeutics may have led to a rethink of pandemic measures.

Particularly when omicron emerged, many things changed. Vaccination efficacy still remained quite high with severe disease, but with two doses it decreased significantly. Data from Ontario suggested very limited protection 20-plus weeks after the vaccine dose was administered, which really impacted the use of the proof of vaccination policy to limit transmission associated with travel. One could argue that such a mandate was important to reduce severe disease in travellers, as the vaccines still remain an important measure for that, but we know that the distribution of severe disease is uneven. An unvaccinated 12-year-old still presents a significantly lower risk of hospitalization than a fully vaccinated 80-year-old with available boosters.

Adding to this, the use of quarantine and border measures was also challenged. PCR testing, which was used earlier in the pandemic, is expensive and carries the risk of identifying low-risk or asymptomatic individuals with a prior infection, as they may shed non-viable virus for weeks and even months after infection. This became magnified in the era of omicron, particularly when many provinces limited access to PCR testing for the general public. Many individuals may not have been able to document their prior infection with a PCR test, thereby increasing the risk that an individual identified for random testing will test positive and have to undergo quarantine while posing no threat to the local community.

The use of random testing for variants was important as a secondary benefit, but there were other methods of surveillance, with the ability to do local surveillance and sequencing to improve our variant maps across the country. There was also global data sharing, which allowed for many countries to share data transparently, underlying again the collaboration that allowed us to examine variants of concern without using the international border as a method to do that. The reality is that all variants of concern eventually did reach Canada, with the omicron subvariants currently circulating.

Finally, the use of quarantine in asymptomatic individuals in the omicron era in the context of wide-scale community transmission was really of limited community benefit, recognizing that chains of transmissions were far more likely to occur domestically than they were with international travel or travel over an international border. The lack of benefit was also magnified over the land border, where shorter and same-day travel with personal vehicles coming from a single country with very transparent access to variant data lowered the rationale for employing these measures at the land border.

A modelling study by IATA looked at what the impact of testing and quarantine measures would be in a number of different scenarios, such as an omicron emergence or a vaccine emergence. Across a number of different modelling scenarios, they saw a delay in the peak of infections of two to four days, with largely the same peak of infections noted in local communities. So yes, these measures, if instituted appropriately and at 100%, may work, but all they may do is delay the peak—not necessarily delay the number of infections but delay when they occur and—

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Dr. Chagla, I'm sorry, but the time is up and we must move on.

[Dr. Zain Chagla]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much for that information.

Ms. Pasher, you have up to five minutes, please.

[Monette Pasher, President, Canadian Airports Council]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good day, committee members. My name is Monette Pasher. I'm the president of the Canadian Airports Council. I'm pleased to appear before you today on behalf of our members, Canada's airports, to speak to your study on the impacts of the ArriveCAN app.

Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge that I join you today on the unceded territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin nation.

Like so many sectors, we are focused on learning lessons from the pandemic and leveraging tools to support more efficient travel. Part of that means finding ways to innovate and to create a streamlined process for passengers in Canada's airports as we see the return to travel. Canada's airports have long advocated for tools that create efficiencies at our border without compromising the integrity of our national security. Over our history, the airport sector has welcomed measures like border pre-clearance agreements and the NEXUS program, which have helped streamline the travel experience for passengers. We know that achieving greater efficiencies with border processing means deploying new technology solutions.

From the perspective of our members, digital tools must be the cornerstone of the future of air travel. To that end, ArriveCAN can be part of the solution rather than the problem, but only if it's used correctly. It is important to distinguish between the application itself and its use to manage the impacts of the pandemic. Now with the inclusion of the advance declaration within ArriveCAN, we have taken the first step down the path of using technology to support low-risk travellers.

Many of you have heard publicly from our members over the last several months that our sector had been advocating for all COVID-19 health checks and testing to be removed, as visitors were choosing not to come to Canada because of potentially being required to quarantine for 14 days. As of Saturday, these policies have officially changed, which we very much welcome and appreciate, but fusing public health checks with the customs process has unfortunately shrouded the true benefits that this technology can deliver to both our passengers and our airports.

When used to allow passengers to accomplish in advance via the application what they had traditionally been required to do at a kiosk in our airports, this tool presents a tremendous opportunity. There are notable benefits to moving away from using ArriveCAN for public health checks and toward using it as a tool to streamline existing border processes, which, it must be noted, was the intended purpose behind creating the platform in the first place.

Passengers can now complete their advance declaration using ArriveCAN up to 72 hours in advance at some of our airports. For travellers, this cuts down total processing time by more than half. That is quantifiable. It's a measurable improvement in processing times. That feature benefits travellers who choose to use the platform, but it also shrinks wait times for all travellers in line, whether they choose to use the app or the traditional route. It helps get everyone to their destination more quickly.

Our borders are essential to both our safety and our security. Getting travellers across boundaries more quickly does not require sacrificing either one. It simply requires us to use our resources practically and correctly to offer new and more sophisticated ways of accomplishing the same goals. Technology is key to that.

We ask our government leaders and our stakeholder partners to remain focused on working collaboratively with us so that we can deploy and implement those important tools. Rather than disregarding ArriveCAN, we should take stock of how it can be used best.

The result from the advance declaration function proves the value of doing just that. Now we need the legislative and regulatory authority under the Customs Act to fully modernize our border. We will continue to be a partner in making the right investments and decisions to help reduce processing times. It is what travellers expect.

Thank you for your time. I look forward to the discussion.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

We'll move on to Mayor Diodati for five minutes, please.

[Jim Diodati, Mayor, City of Niagara Falls]

Thank you very much to the committee. I'll do my best not to repeat anything.

Niagara Falls is the number one leisure destination in Canada. We get upwards of 20 million visits per year, and 40,000 people count on tourism to feed their families, pay their mortgages and pay their bills. COVID has been devastating for us. Tourism is $105-billion export industry in this country, and it's affected Niagara Falls as a tourist community to the tune of billions of dollars. I have submitted documentation from Niagara Falls Tourism, the Peace Bridge authority and the Niagara Parks Commission to further illustrate the impact that it's had on us here.

To illustrate to the group the number of people who come here, we get approximately 10 million crossings of our four international bridges. The majority of people who come into this country do so at land border crossings, and oftentimes it's what we refer to as the “rubber tire market”—people impulsively making a decision to come to Niagara Falls.

The typical scenario is a family wakes up, the weather is nice and they make a decision at breakfast to drive to Niagara Falls. They get in the van, they get to the border and they're questioned about the ArriveCAN app, of course, and most of them have no idea what it's about. They're then asked to download it, and oftentimes they do not have roaming and most times do not have access to Wi-Fi at the border. Then our CBSA border guards, instead of worrying about drugs, guns and criminals, become administrators helping them download the app, with questionable outcomes.

I don't need to explain the glitchiness and problems we've experienced with it, but what happens? These people get very frustrated, and as we often say, when you have an experience that's good, you tell someone, and when it's bad, you tell 10 people. That's exactly what's been happening.

There has been a lot of negativity through the U.S. media and the word of mouth that's travelling throughout the United States, and now many people have decided to bypass Canada with their leisure dollars. Our bigger concern going forward is the long-term residual effect of the negativity around our borders. We're going to be looking for the federal and provincial governments to work together to help us fund a campaign to get the word out that we've removed these unnecessary requirements at our borders and once again are open for business. Our ultimate goal, of course, was always to be safe, and early on we supported all the border measures to keep our communities safe. As Dr. Zain Chagla illustrated, there came a point when it wasn't doing that any longer.

We were hopeful that at the beginning of the tourism season, these measures would be lifted so we would have a chance for a recovery. Typically, 50% of the revenue that comes into Niagara Falls comes from U.S. visitation. Americans typically stay longer and spend more, so the long-term effect of this requirement at the border has been devastating. Now, unfortunately, the tourism season is over and 80% of our revenue comes during the summer. Now we're in what's known as the shoulder season, and we'll be going into the holiday season. The tourism operators in Niagara Falls need to make enough revenue during the summer to carry them through the shoulder season and through the winter until the next season is upon us.

We were very hopeful that tourism would return this year. The good news is that domestic tourism returned to prepandemic levels and beyond, so clearly people were ready to return, but unfortunately U.S. visitation was approximately half of prepandemic numbers. We point our fingers squarely at the border measures, including the ArriveCAN app.

We have a lot of businesses right now that are trying to figure out how they're going to pay their bills going into the shoulder season. We're grateful, first of all, that it's been removed, and we're hopeful that the federal government will work with the provinces to help us come up with an advertising campaign. I've suggested a grand reopening of Canada right here in Niagara Falls with the Prime Minister and the premier so we can let the Americans know that once again we are open for business.

That's all I have at this time. Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Mayor Diodati.

Ms. Potter, please go ahead.

[Beth Potter, President and Chief Executive Officer, Tourism Industry Association of Canada]

Madam Chair and members of the committee, I would like to thank you for inviting me here today.

My name is Beth Potter and I am the president and CEO of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada. I will be presenting my remarks in English, but I will be happy to answer your questions in French during the question period.

Before I give my remarks, I acknowledge that we are gathered here today on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin nation.

TIAC is the national advocate for tourism in Canada. Acting on behalf of thousands of businesses across the country, our work involves promoting policies, programs and other initiatives that foster the growth of the sector.

Tourism matters. It enables socio-economic development, job creation and poverty reduction. This in turn drives prosperity and has a significant positive social impact, providing unique opportunities to women, minorities and young people. The benefits of travel and tourism spread far beyond the direct GDP impact and employment, with indirect gains extending through the entire travel ecosystem and supply chains to other sectors. I will highlight also that tourism plays an important role as head ambassador on the global stage in sharing Canada's values and principles, and is a crucial vehicle for fostering social cohesion.

As I shared with you during my last appearance, the multitude of restrictions that were put in place during the pandemic to keep Canadians safe, including border closures and lockdowns, had a devastating impact on the tourism industry. I also shared with you that as our hard work to recover from the pandemic continues, we now face new challenges, such as disruptions in supply chains, inflation at a 40-year high, rising interest rates and a severe labour shortage, to name a few.

We are still a very long way from recovering Canada's travel economy to its former glory. The latest forecast estimates that total tourism spending in Canada is now tracking to return to prepandemic levels by 2025. In fact, those estimates forecast that total spending levels from both domestic and international sources will reach $80 billion by the end of this December. That's 24% lower than our prepandemic high-water mark. Domestic spending is expected to recover much quicker than spending in the international market, but it's still down 16%, and international spending is down 53% compared with 2019.

The international market is important to consider and actively promote. This is because foreign tourists tend to travel longer when they come to Canada and tend to spend more per trip.

When I last spoke with you, we were hopeful to see a significant resurgence in tourism this summer. We know that people want to travel and we know there is considerable pent-up demand to get out there and experience all that Canada has to offer. I'm pleased to share with you that this summer season has certainly been better than the last two years, and there is hope for optimism.

We are particularly grateful for Minister Boissonnault's leadership in launching the important process of updating Canada's tourism growth strategy. This initiative is intended to result in a comprehensive action plan to help the Canadian tourism industry rebuild from the impact of the pandemic and best position it for future growth and success.

In our submission, which we tabled in early August, we outlined key priorities to help the tourism sector build forward to be the economic powerhouse that it once was. We recommended that a number of key targets be achieved by 2030. These relate to tourism spending, dispersion, workforce, international overnight visitors and our global competitive position.

Critical to the success of the new federal strategy is, as we also highlighted, the need for all tourism partners across the whole of government to work towards the same goals. In this regard, we recommended the creation of a tourism policy council of ministers, led by the Minister of Tourism, to ensure that tourism is prioritized across federal departments and that decision-making is aligned. We also identified four key pillars that would best underpin the new strategy: attract and retain a sustainable tourism workforce, improve access for visitors to and within Canada, develop and promote tourism assets, and build a regenerative and inclusive tourism industry.

We emphasize that tourism is a broad ecosystem, a complex value chain that will only ever be as strong as its weakest link. Therefore, the new strategy and the measures it entails must take this reality into consideration, must be comprehensive and must seek to bolster as much as possible each of these important links.

With a new comprehensive and effective strategy in place, we are optimistic in the tourism industry's potential to not only recover to prepandemic levels in the next few years, but return to the annual growth performance it was achieving up until 2020. This, we further contend, will only be possible if private and public sector partners continue to work together and the right tools and measures are put in place.

You might not be surprised to hear me say that we fully welcomed the government's decision early last week to remove all remaining COVID entry restrictions—the testing, quarantine and isolation requirements—for anyone entering Canada and to lift the mandatory masking requirement.

In closing, I note that we are happy the ArriveCAN app will henceforth become a voluntary tool to help streamline the customs process. I am far from convinced that it was an effective tool for controlling the entry and spread of COVID, and I know how much it caused problems for travellers and tourism businesses.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Ms. Potter.

Mr. Boudreau, you have five minutes, please.

[Trevor Boudreau, Manager, Government Relations, Vancouver Airport Authority]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good morning, everyone.

I'm grateful to be joining you today from my office here at YVR, which is located on the traditional and unceded territory of the Musqueam people. I pay my respects to elders past and present.

On behalf of the Vancouver Airport Authority, we appreciate the opportunity to present to the committee today.

With the federal government removing the mandatory requirements for travellers to submit their personal health and vaccination information, we are pleased that we can now go back to focusing on the original intended purpose for ArriveCAN: to support the continued modernization of Canada's customs processing, which benefits travellers, Canadians and indeed the entire Canadian economy.

YVR has a long history of partnering with the federal government to innovate and modernize traveller processing. I want to acknowledge and thank local CBSA staff, officers and senior departmental officials for their ongoing collaboration over the years.

In preparing for this appearance, I was looking at some old photos of our customs hall here at YVR, and I found one from 2005. It was a time when we were growing our passenger volumes exponentially, and we were deep in the throes of preparing to welcome the world for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. At that time, it was a regular occurrence for the CBSA customs hall at YVR to be packed with passengers. Planes had to be held at gates, and passengers waited hours in lineups as valuable customs officer time was spent reviewing administrative paperwork. Airlines that had connecting service to YVR were actively looking to divert to other U.S. airports and away from YVR completely.

Building our way out of that problem was not an option, so we sat down with the CBSA and, in partnership, looked at an innovative idea, one that combined ultra-efficient technology with live border official interaction. The result was the launch of YVR's border express primary inspection kiosks in 2008.

Today, as members of the committee likely know, these kiosks are widely used in airports and seaports around the world. In North America alone, these kiosks have safely processed over 250 million people without a security incident. Indeed, today a customs officer at YVR can securely process a full A380 aircraft—that's 469 passengers—in about 20 minutes.

Fifteen years ago, kiosks revolutionized customs processing. Now we're here in 2022, and we believe that the ArriveCAN platform will support the next natural evolutionary step in Canada's customs and border processing modernization. The optional advance declaration feature in ArriveCAN is a great example. Right now it seamlessly integrates with existing kiosk technology in the customs hall, and that's thanks to another YVR-CBSA partnership that occurred this past summer.

Today, passengers who use that optional feature in ArriveCAN cut their time in an airport customs hall by half compared with those who do not. That includes families that are arriving together, even when one or two of the loved ones may not be tech savvy or may not have access to a computer and need a bit of help at the kiosk from their family member to complete their declaration when they arrive.

Where we really see the benefit right now is in our international to domestic connections facility. Ms. Potter spoke about the importance of gaining greater access to tourism options, and this is doing it. Travellers who continue to use the ArriveCAN optional feature to submit their advance declaration have the peace of mind that they'll be able to make their connecting flight even if they have a short layover here at YVR, in Toronto or in Montreal, and soon at many other airports across Canada. That's going to be really important for the millions of travellers we're going to welcome through the winter months who need to quickly connect to another Canadian airport to experience our incredible tourism offerings in every part of the country.

In the future, the ArriveCAN platform will help border officials automate the recognition of individuals as the federal government expands its biometric requirements for travellers who apply for visas or for work or study permits as well as newcomers seeking to resettle here in Canada and contribute productively to Canada's economy.

In closing, our ask is the same as that of Ms. Pasher, and that is, first, please stay focused on how ArriveCAN can be used to best modernize while keeping Canada's borders safe and secure, and second, continue to work collaboratively with the entire air sector on that journey of innovation and modernization.

Thank you very much. I look forward to the discussion.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much to all the witnesses.

I'll now open the floor for questions.

Mr. Baldinelli, you have six minutes, please.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for being with us this morning. My only regret is that we did not have the opportunity to have this meeting several months earlier, with ArriveCAN and border restriction measures being lifted prior to our summer tourism season.

I want to begin with Dr. Chagla. Thank you for joining us.

On September 23, the Canadian Travel and Tourism Roundtable welcomed the release of a report called “Evaluating Canada's Pandemic Border and Travel Policies: Lessons Learned”. You are one of the authors of that study. In the release, you're quoted as saying:

We have learned a lot since March 2020. It is no longer scientifically necessary or appropriate to use travel-related pandemic management tools almost three years after the start of COVID-19. Enough time has passed for us to make a scientific assessment as to whether the travel restrictions introduced by the federal government were successful in containing the spread of the virus and its variants.

I have just one question for you, Doctor. In your view, approximately when was it no longer necessary or appropriate to use travel-related pandemic management tools such as ArriveCAN at the border?

[Dr. Zain Chagla]

Thank you for the question.

Obviously hindsight is 20/20. I would say, though, that the data we used to generate that report really was about the lack of efficacy around a vaccine mandate for preventing transmission. Community transmission in local domains was much higher than what would be expected with travel. It became pretty apparent in the spring of 2022 that this was the case.

I think much of our data focused on before then, when there may have been debate, but in the spring of 2022, again, it was much more common, and much more of the transmission was occurring domestically. Many of the restrictions domestically had been lifted, recognizing that many of the measures were not really making sense in that context. Similarly, at the border, the measures were likely not offering any significant benefit at that point either.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls, ON]

I was hoping you could share a copy of that report with our committee for our records and for the report we'll be responsible for in a few weeks' time.

I'd like to go to Mayor Diodati.

Thank you for your presentation, Mayor. I know you've been aggressively advocating for many months for the removal of hindrances that exist at our border crossings. In fact, I believe the City of Niagara Falls even passed a resolution as early as May asking for ArriveCAN to be optional in many instances.

You talked about the impact on our city. How badly was the city of Niagara Falls impacted? You talked about some information from Niagara Falls Tourism and the Niagara Parks Commission. I'm wondering if you could quickly share some of that information.

[Jim Diodati]

Thank you for the question.

Yes, it's been hugely impactful and devastating. I'll just take one example—the Niagara Parks Commission. They have 1,100 employees, and typically, two-thirds of their revenue is international. Of course, a significant amount of that is U.S. visitation. Let's call it what it is. They're our number one market, of course, out of anywhere in the world, by far. They were down by over $1 billion.

We focus on good customer service and treating our customers well, but when I look at the bridge numbers, the delays were four times what they should be because of ArriveCAN. That was with greatly reduced volume, so the customer service levels were very much lacking.

Another impact, Mr. Baldinelli, is on senior citizens who live in these communities. I was inundated with calls from these people, who said they felt they were being discriminated against. They were proud to show their passports and happy to show their vaccination status and boosters, but were offended that they were being forced to do something they couldn't do. We have the statistics.

Not to target seniors, but by and large they're not as tech savvy as younger kids are, and a lot of them could not do the app because they didn't have smart phones or computers. I don't have to look any further than my father, who is 80 years old and has a flip phone. This is what it's like living in a border community. We go over the river, just like you would cross town wherever you live. We go to visit our family and our friends.

It was disruptive to our family and friends in addition to the revenue. Every Thursday, my dad and mom would go over the river. They would go shopping. They'd visit some of their family and friends. They'd go out for dinner and they'd come back. They haven't done that in three years. They missed some very important and significant events—weddings, funerals and others.

I can tell you that seniors felt very discriminated against, because many of them do not have mastery of digital technology. To say that it's been devastating is an understatement. We're frustrated that we lost another tourism season to the international markets. We're looking for a recovery.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls, ON]

Thank you, Mayor Diodati.

I have a quick question for Ms. Potter.

You were here in June, and during your presentation at that time, I think you talked about 10 million day trips by American visitors. What's it going to take for us to get back to that figure? How long will it take? What's the impact of American visitation on the Canadian tourism sector?

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Please give a brief answer, Ms. Potter.

[Beth Potter]

We're expecting that it's going to take a number of years to get those numbers back up to where they were prepandemic.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Virani, please go ahead.

[Arif Virani, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Thank you very much to all of the witnesses.

Dr. Chagla, I enjoy listening to you on the CBC. Thank you for your service.

Mayor Diodati, I appreciated being in your jurisdiction for our caucus meetings this summer.

I'm going to direct my first question to Mr. Boudreau.

What I thought was interesting is the exercise you took us through about Vancouver in 2005 and the challenges you faced. Working with government authorities, you came up with a workaround, which produced the kiosks with which we are now very familiar. You're analogizing where we are with ArriveCAN to the introduction of the kiosks about 14 years ago, by my account.

Can you pick up on something you said about working with airports and how we work with the airlines going forward? Just touch upon this, and I'll get to Ms. Pasher as well.

If ArriveCAN now has this advance declaration option, and it speeds up processing times by up to 50% for people who choose to use it, how do we make sure that enough people are aware of that feature and aware of the time savings it represents? How do we give them the ability to have it on their phones and access Wi-Fi or roaming when they're arriving?

One thing that I'm thinking about is the availability of Wi-Fi when you're on the tarmac. You could be doing that instead of filling out those old, cumbersome little five-by-seven forms that ask you about how much tobacco and alcohol you're bringing into the country. Do you have any thoughts on that?

[Trevor Boudreau]

Thanks for the question.

It's funny; I was thinking that too. I always remember being on a plane and fumbling for a pen or trying to ask a neighbour if I can get a pen to try to fill out those cards. I'm glad to see those gone.

When it comes to raising awareness of ArriveCAN, here's a stat for you. Right now, we see that here at YVR—and I believe it's roughly the same at all Canadian airports where folks can use it—about 30% of international travellers use the advance declaration feature. That's not bad, but we need to maintain it, at least, and grow it to achieve the benefits.

I told you about the connections facility. Our airline partners want to see connections done as quickly as possible and, to use a bit of an industry term, want to “turn the plane” as quickly as possible. It's a tremendous benefit for them. Anything we can do as a combined sector—airlines, airports, government partners, the federal government, yourselves as representatives—to raise awareness of that is important.

When it comes to the ability for folks to access Wi-Fi, I was just down in Blaine, Washington, before the federal requirement was lifted, and I was able to access the Wi-Fi at my hotel, use it to quickly file the ArriveCAN declaration and—Bob's your uncle—get through the border really fast. That's land mode.

Here at the air mode, folks are a little more used to filing their customs declarations, so we believe that through a concerted communications campaign, and building literacy and awareness, we'll be able to keep those numbers up and hopefully grow them.

[Arif Virani, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

If I could, I'll turn to Ms. Pasher now.

Thank you for your presentation. At the very end, you reiterated some of the themes we heard from Mr. Boudreau, but you also mentioned towards the end that with this opportunity from the advance declaration, there also comes the need for a modernization of the Customs Act with respect to legislative authority. I wonder if you could concretize, itemize or specify the type of modernization you'd like to see in the Customs Act, if you have any concrete suggestions.

[Monette Pasher]

Sure. Just to follow up on the previous question, people can submit their advance declaration 72 hours in advance, so it doesn't need to be done on the plane. There is time in advance to do that. Right now it's only in place at Toronto Pearson and Vancouver, but we want to quickly move that to other airports across the country and continue this rollout of technology.

As to the next piece, moving forward, we see ArriveCAN as one element in improving processing at our airports. We need to modernize the Customs Act. We need to move away from customs officers needing to process every passenger. We need to get to a place where there is facial recognition and biometrics, like what you would see in Europe, where you go through the eGate and your picture is taken. You've already been pre-approved, and then you get a go or no-go sign, a green light or a red light. That's where we need to move in terms of border modernization in Canada.

We've been working on this for over a decade, and now is the time. I think we've seen this summer the challenges we have in processing, given we were in this pandemic space with all the different measures that were thrust upon our airports and the tourism industry.

Moving forward, air travel is going to continue to grow. It's going to double by 2040, and we need to be ready. We need to be prepared. I think we only need to look as far as Europe to see how we can do this the right way. I think the CBSA is ready for that, so the next step is our legislation and regulations and moving forward with that.

A big piece of that is ensuring that it's not going to be mandatory; it's going to be voluntary. The people who want to increase their throughput at the gates can do that, and the people who want to use paper and aren't good with technology can do it the old way. I think having that option there is also important.