International Trade Committee on Oct. 4th, 2022

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

Thank you for those comments. One thing that I'd be concerned about specifically, if you're using visual technology and facial recognition, is how we ensure they're applied in a neutral manner and not disproportionately against people who dress a certain way, look a certain way or come from certain countries.

That was important commentary. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

We'll move on to Monsieur Savard-Tremblay, for six minutes, please.

[Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I want to greet my colleagues and thank all the witnesses for their presence and testimony.

My first question is for Mr. Chagla.

The use of ArriveCAN is now optional and is done on a voluntary basis. The various public health authorities are expecting, in a slightly more northern climate like ours, an increase in cases over the next few weeks and months. There is talk of a new wave.

If border measures were to be reinstated, how should the ArriveCAN application be improved to avoid the problems of the past, which you yourself have denounced today and in the past, and to ensure that there will be no similar problems in the future?

[Dr. Zain Chagla]

Thank you for the question. The big thing we're looking at is what's happening in Europe right now, where the virus continues to evolve. I think we all agree with that. The pathway for the virus to evolve is more immune evasion. As we have more populations that are immunized and more populations that have been infected, the virus is only going to gain mutations to then evade immunity more and more, which makes proof of vaccination even less prioritized in that context, given that with two doses, three doses or even four doses of vaccination, there will likely be a breakthrough rate that is significant, with a time-limited benefit to vaccinations for preventing infections. They are still important with respect to severe disease, but the use of vaccinations as a way to separate people at high and low risk is likely coming off the table for a significant amount of time.

I would say the use of proof of vaccination to cross the border is not going to be effective in the foreseeable future given the way this virus continues to evolve to be more immune-evasive. Also, random testing is probably not going to be a long-term effective strategy considering that we've done a lot of work in terms of sequencing within our communities to identify variants of concern that have started circulating and that will likely start to circulate locally before we even identify they're a problem internationally. We've done a lot of work with waste water and other modalities that are passive to also integrate those into screening.

Again, the measures, I think, have little left in terms of their benefits, even with variant X or variant Y coming down the pipeline, and I think our focus should be on vaccinating locally, getting appropriate treatments locally and protecting high-risk populations locally, like those in long-term care and those who are immunocompromised, rather than using the border as a tool to mitigate something that can't really be mitigated at the border.

[Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

If I summarize your answer correctly, we can't really improve ArriveCAN, and any action at the border would be null and void.

[Dr. Zain Chagla]

Yes, absolutely, and again, we've seen this across the world. More than 100 countries have largely dropped their border restrictions, the last being New Zealand, which is a country that really embraced every measure possible to reduce transmission. There's been a recognition that the measures at the border were not offering significant benefit and were causing significant pandemic disruption and that efforts locally were more important. They also dropped all measures in that context.

This is where we are in the world. We're not an outlier in this context.

[Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

In that case, do you believe that we are now in the endemic phase of the crisis, that the pandemic phase is over, or that it will be over imminently?

[Dr. Zain Chagla]

We will likely have waves of transmission. How we mitigate those and how we mitigate things like isolation and health care, which are big problems as we move forward, how we mitigate vaccinations and vaccine fatigue and how we mitigate access to therapeutics are really going to define how impactful these waves are going to be. With as much population immunity as we have, though, through vaccination and natural infection—we have data from the Canadian immunity task force and from British Columbia suggesting that 60% to 70% of Canadians have had COVID—I think we are probably at a point where the disease is causing local transmission but not necessarily in an emergency phase.

I practise in an acute-care hospital in a large context with many complex patients. In the last three to four months, there have been between zero and five people in our ICU, and even some of them have not been there primarily for COVID reasons. That acute health care demand phase of COVID is probably settling down, and with everything we have, it probably won't be a major issue from an intensive-care standpoint.

[Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Ladies, as I only have 30 seconds left in my time, I am going to ask you a question, but, if you do not have time to answer it, you can complete your answer during the next round of questions.

You have told us how disadvantageous this has been for your respective sectors. How well did your documentation and research distinguish between what was caused by ArriveCAN and what was caused by the other measures?

[Monette Pasher]

I would say that at different stages of the pandemic, obviously, there were quite different challenges. In the earliest stages, ArriveCAN and the border processing by the CBSA were substantial challenges in terms of both staff shortages and processing. It took so much additional time at the desk with the border agent to go through this entire process. There was a lot of duplication.

As time moved on and we made the process more efficient, it became less about that and more about the staffing shortage across the board. I would say it depends on which stage you're talking about, but certainly in the early days it was a very large issue.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

We'll move on to Mr. Bachrach, please, for six minutes.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and thanks for allowing me to join your committee for a very interesting discussion.

It seems as though we're talking about two separate aspects of the issue here. We're talking about the appropriateness of the vaccination requirement at our borders, and we're talking about the application of the app. I want to separate those in my questioning. Perhaps I'll start with the former.

Dr. Chagla, I really appreciate not only your appearance today but your work over the course of the pandemic. I remember we had you at the transport committee very early on to talk about some of the quarantine measures.

Perhaps I could start with a question about Canada's COVID outcomes. How has Canada fared in terms of COVID outcomes writ large compared with other G7 countries, and to what do you attribute that?

[Dr. Zain Chagla]

I think this is timely. There's a report from the Public Health Agency of Canada that talks about measures that have helped. Certainly there were difficult discussions in the first year, but we fared better than many other countries in the world did—the United States and those in Europe—in limiting morbidity and mortality from the disease. That's not to say we didn't have problems. As a clinician, I can remember the devastation that we had in long-term care facilities in the first couple of waves, and that really marked a very vulnerable group in the pandemic, which was disproportionately affected in that sense.

Similarly, I think of the appropriate and rapid access to vaccines and positive public health messaging. As the virus progressed and we were able to get vaccinated, that paid dividends on everything.

This is interesting when you start looking at the last year of the pandemic, from August 2021 to August 2022. Canada actually fared very well compared with other countries, including places that had significant measures, such as Hong Kong, which did not vaccinate its elderly appropriately. Once the virus made its way there, despite significant measures in place like masking, quarantine requirements and testing at the airport, the cumulative deaths per capita over the entire pandemic was higher in Hong Kong than in Canada. That really was marked over a couple of months of the pandemic.

I think Canada has done very well on this stage. It's hard to dissect what exactly it was, but I think the co-operation between provincial and federal governments, particularly in the first year and a half of the pandemic, and the widespread availability of vaccinations have largely put us front and centre as one of the countries that tried to balance everything appropriately going forward.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you, Dr. Chagla.

When we talk about the border vaccine requirements, if I interpret what you're saying correctly, it seems that the government failed in not adapting its measures in response to changing information about the nature of the pandemic. Is that a fair characterization?

Can I add on a second question? I assume that you have conversations with folks at PHAC. Has anyone offered you an explanation of why they didn't adapt to changing conditions in a more timely way?

[Dr. Zain Chagla]

I'll answer the last question first.

I have not had a discussion with the Public Health Agency of Canada about the rationale for vaccine requirements—especially after some of us started questioning exactly what the requirements were.

I will say that many provinces recognized that proof of vaccination outside of special domains like health care and long-term care was unlikely to offer a significant benefit to the population to reduce transmission, and it was largely dropped. Many provinces started going through this in March and April as omicron started fading, recognizing again that the evidence behind a two-dose vaccine mandate or a single dose of Johnson & Johnson, which could have been a year or more ago, was that they likely had very little impact on pandemic transmission.

That was March and April of 2022. We're talking right now in September 2022 about finally dropping it at the airport to cross the border. There was a delay in recognizing that this was not an effective measure. Again, the impacts of it were felt across a number of different sectors.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thanks, Dr. Chagla.

I'm going to try to sneak in one more question. It's for Mr. Boudreau from YVR.

We talk about the conversation around the app. There was a very loud outcry because of the delays it was causing, and particularly so at the land borders, because of accessibility issues for certain demographics. The call from some quarters was to scrap the app.

What I heard in the presentations from both you and Ms. Pasher was that this kind of approach has merit. When you heard calls from certain parties to scrap the app entirely, were you concerned that we were going to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, when it came to the potential of an app-based approach?

[Trevor Boudreau]

You said something off the top that was really important, and it's important for the committee to hear it again. We need to separate the requirements for vaccine and health information from the use and application of the app itself. The app and the platform it's based on will be an important part of Canada's modernization of the future border. There's no doubt about that.

We've been without the federal requirements only since Saturday, so we don't have data here at the airport to demonstrate whether that's improved. However, we can see that in other jurisdictions where similar travel measures have been taken away, there's been an improvement.

To circle back, the app is going to be incredibly important moving forward for Canada's borders, particularly in the air mode.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

We'll move on to Mr. Lewis, for five minutes, please.

[Chris Lewis, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to all of the witnesses here today.

For everyone's clarification, this is a study on the impact of ArriveCAN on Canada. It's not on what it would look like going forward but on what the impact on Canadian businesses, families and workers has been. That's what this study is all about. I'm going to stick to that line of questioning.

I have to say that I'm really proud to be sitting here surrounded by the MPs for Niagara and Sarnia, who represent incredibly busy border crossings, and by their neighbour. That MP and I are right by the busiest international border crossing in North America, in Windsor.

To Mr. Bachrach's statement about those who have called to scrap the app, well, I'm guilty as charged. My office was absolutely inundated with phone calls from businesses, from folks trying to get across, from nurses and from doctors who had glitches and had to spend time in quarantine for literally no reason other than the app had failed. If it meant fighting for people to have some normalcy in their life, then I'm proud to have done that.

My first question is for Mr. Boudreau and Ms. Pasher.

Last week at committee, we heard from the CBSA union. They said the app completely slowed down people crossing at the border. Would each of you please give us some background on that?

Before that—I'll probably have time for only two questions—I think it's important for me to note one more time, just so you both know, a story I told last week. Long story short, a business came in with four folks on a private plane. They sat on the apron in Windsor for two and a half hours because one of the four had a glitch in their app, not through their own fault. They stayed on the plane, then left and took their business with them.

I would love to hear from both witnesses about why they believe this app will actually help.

[Trevor Boudreau]

Ms. Pasher, maybe I can go first, if you want to go next.

[Monette Pasher]

Yes, sure.

[Trevor Boudreau]

Thank you.

It's important to recognize that we represent the air mode, and the land border is significantly different from the air border. I'm not an expert on the land border, so I'll leave my comments to the air border.

When it comes to the air border, folks are used to filing declarations or doing paperwork, as you're used to using technology to get through the border process. As I said in my last answer, we haven't had enough time since the federal restrictions were lifted on October 1 to measure a difference in processing times, but again, as we've seen, in other jurisdictions where those similar travel measures were removed—the requirement to submit health information and vaccine verification—there was an increase in speed in customs processing.

[Chris Lewis, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Thank you very much, sir.

Ms. Pasher, please go ahead.

[Monette Pasher]

I'd like to echo that same point about the differentiation between the land border and the air border, because the measures really are different.

In terms of the air border, our view is that if we hadn't had the ArriveCAN application, we would have been doing all of this manually, and it would have been taking a lot more time. Because of the health measures that were in place and because the government mandated them, we actually did need some technology application in order to process people. I think that would be our view. It was needed at the air border because of the pandemic restrictions.

[Chris Lewis, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Thank you to both of the witnesses.

I have 50 seconds left.

Mayor Diodati, our mayor in Windsor, Mayor Dilkens, was as adamant as you were to get our borders back to some type of normalcy. Our casino and our tourism area, like yours, have been completely gut-punched.

I have 30 seconds, Mr. Diodati. Do you feel that ArriveCAN specifically contributed to this decline, more so than the vaccination status?