Thank you for that usual allowance, Mr. Chairman, because you cannot look at this in isolation. You have to look at it in the broad context.
As I was saying, 18,000 trucks a day are crossing that border. In a year, some 21 million cars are looked into by border officers, literally as they come to the border.
Before the day is over some two dozen drug seizures will have taken place by border officers. Five situations will arise where weapons will have to be taken from somebody crossing the border, illegal weapons, and one of those will be a firearm.
More than once a week, a missing child who has been put up on the missing child index is apprehended at the border.
All that trade, all the incidents that take place, everything that goes on at the border narrows down to something like 3,600 people, the border officers themselves. They are highly trained. They are capable and trained to do arrests and seizures. For a number of years, they have requested the ability to be properly equipped in every way, including the ability to be armed.
We know that though crime stats in some areas have gone down, many areas of serious crime, organized crime, aggravated assault--the tendency we see is for people committing grievous crimes in the United States to try to get into Canada.
Some disturbing stats show these crime rates increasing. When it is brought to the attention of our border officers, some of whom are serving in work alone situations, that there is the possibility of a dangerous or armed person approaching the border--and if you flip this around and it's someone from Canada, a dangerous person approaching the U.S. border and the notice is given, their border officers are armed and they are prepared to take care of a situation should it arise. Our border officers are not.
In those moments, as you know, there are too often cases where border officers will leave their post, because they deem the situation to be unsafe and they are not armed. They will first close the post and then they will leave it until sufficient assistance comes, either from police of a local jurisdiction or the RCMP themselves.
This causes huge economic problems. As you know, with just-in-time manufacturing these days, a border, especially a large border, only has to be shut down for two to three hours and immediately you can see manufacturing lines and assembly lines starting to close down on the other side of the border.
The costs of this, quite rightly, are a concern of this committee. All kinds of numbers have been thrown around because looking at it from a first instance a lot of variables came into play.
The training and the arming costs of this many border officers--we're talking about 4,800, 3,600 at the border and another 1,200 at other places--is about $400 million and almost half of that is in the retraining and the recertification that has to happen each year as border officers are retrained.
Other figures get added into that whole picture, giving a larger global amount. One hundred million dollars is the estimate right now for what will be required for the training facilities to be enhanced, not just for the training of border officers, but there are integrity and structural realities. There has been an ongoing need to rebuild at Rigaud, about $100 million there alone.
Then there is the cost of hiring 400 more individuals to fill in approximately 95 sites at some time during the day across the country where people are working alone.
Added to what we see as pressure on bringing the overall global prices down is the fact that CBSA is now committed to--along with the initial training that is going to be happening in Ottawa and at the RCMP base in Chilliwack, once the trainers have all been trained and once the training process starts--inviting proposals as early as this April for alternate sites, people who can provide the accommodation at alternate sites and not only speed up the process, but keep the price down, not the training itself. That will be done by CBSA, in terms of provision of the sites.
Mr. Chairman, that gives a ballpark figure of what we're looking at. I'd be more than happy to entertain questions, suggestions, and advice from committee members.