Public Safety Committee on May 29th, 2017

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

That's great.

I have three more questions, if I can get through them.

I know that we have eight pre-clearance areas right now. I'm assuming that those have been working really well and that's the reason why we wanted to expand them.

Are there areas that have been problematic and that you feel were addressed or not addressed in the new legislation? Under the current pre-clearance system, were there some things that needed to be addressed? If so, what were they, and have they been addressed in the new legislation?

[Maryscott Greenwood]

In the air environment?

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

It could be air, it could be rail, it could be anything. But to me, we're talking pre-clearance, so have we studied what went well, what hasn't gone well, and addressed it in the new legislation?

[Maryscott Greenwood]

We have a lot of data about how to run pre-clearance. The main thing that the new agreement and legislation does is expand it beyond the air agreement. We figured out over the last 50 years how to do it pretty well, and over the years there have been some modifications to the protection and security arrangements at the airports, but I think the main feature is in expanding into other environments beyond air.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Okay.

My next question is—

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

You're actually over, but you may get another little bit of time.

Ms. Damoff.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I have a quick question for Rocky Mountaineer. One of the issues that's come up has been about the availability of Canadian Border Services agents. At Pearson Airport that's likely not going to be an issue because you have both U.S. and Canadian agents in the airport. For Rocky Mountaineer, would you have Canadian Border Services agents at the rail station as well as American ones if there were to be pre-clearance?

[Alroy Chan]

We're still working through that. We don't know what the service model will look like yet on the northbound journey back up to Rocky Mountaineer Station. Currently while we go southbound post-clearance, we actually arrive out of our station. Northbound we arrive into Via Rail's Pacific Central Station, which already has an established CBSA staff there, recognizing that it's a challenge for CBSA to make a visit to our station even on our operations today, but we're still exploring that. We still have to go through the research and analysis to figure out how best to implement that, if we were to pursue that.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Because it's really important.

[Alroy Chan]

Yes.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Part of the legislation, in particular when we're talking about strip searches, is the availability of a Canadian within a reasonable time. I don't think we have much of a concern in an airport, but we would, depending on how you set up your model for the Rocky Mountaineer. So if you can keep that in mind as you are going through your—

[Alroy Chan]

Yes. I can address that one.

If we implement pre-clearance at Rocky Mountaineer Station, about a kilometre away is Pacific Central Station, so our current thinking right now is CBSA officers are actually at Pacific Central around the same time that we depart, or shortly thereafter. We have had discussions with CBSA on whether those officers could come to our station when our departure is scheduled. It's only a kilometre away, so we can share some efficiencies there. That is our current thinking. We'll have to revisit that as we get more departures and more dates, but that currently can work. It's one of the avenues that we're pursuing to make sure this works.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Okay.

[Maryscott Greenwood]

May I address this?

From our point of view, the big vision would be that Canadian and U.S. agents are cross-trained, and they would be interchangeable. If you think about NORAD , if you think about the defence of North American security, on any given day a Canadian officer might be commanding U.S. military to secure our airspace, and in fact it was a Canadian officer who directed the planes to Gander, Newfoundland on 9/11 and secured the airspace.

That works enormously well, so if you look at the defence collaboration as a model for law enforcement, it would be much more efficient from our point of view to have that at all of these little communities across the Canada/U.S. border. I think of Derby Line, Vermont and the Eastern Townships of Quebec. It's really expensive to staff those, so sometimes they're closed because you don't have staffing. From a broad vision from our point of view, it would be terrific to have Canadian and U.S. officials cross-trained and be able to deal with whatever they need to deal with at the border. That would be in the future from our point of view.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

So they would both be trained at the same time on the same laws, and they'd be basically interchangeable then.

[Maryscott Greenwood]

That would be the vision from our point of view, yes.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

That's not what's in the legislation now but that would be further—

[Maryscott Greenwood]

That's sort of the idea. If you really want to have a perimeter approach to the border, and if you're constrained with government resources, personnel, and all of that, our thought is think creatively and look at.... Again, the United States doesn't have this kind of relationship with any other country in the world, and I don't think it would consider it. But because Canada and the United States are so close, because we trust each other so much and we work together, and because we have such giant economies and security at stake, we think this is the place in the world that it can be done.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

You have about half a minute if you'd like to ask anything else.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I can't ask a question in half a minute. I'm sorry, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

We'll give you two minutes, and then we're done.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

This might be a little bit of an odd question. I recently was reading that there might be a ban on laptops from the U.S. The world changes constantly. While the core of this bill is really about business, the pre-clearance, efficiencies, and allowing people and goods to move as quickly as possible—that's what we need for our economy to work well—security gets in the way, and it is a key consideration.

Do you believe the bill is flexible enough for us to be adjusting as different security requirements come up? I don't know if you can respond to that, but it's just something that has come to mind.

[Maryscott Greenwood]

It's a great question. I think it probably is because it gives the reciprocal agreements, but I'm not entirely certain of that. It's certainly an important step. You have the ability to change things at a moment's notice here, right?

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Sometimes, but sometimes it takes a while.

The last question should be very short. How does our pre-clearance stack up to others in the world? I'm sure Europe does it, I'm sure different parts of the world do this, but how does our pre-clearance process stack up? Is it best in class, or are there things that other people can do that we can't? Do you know?

[Maryscott Greenwood]

The U.S. and Canada are clearly the model for the world. The U.S. has other pre-clearance agreements that are limited with other countries, and which are much newer than the Canada-U.S. one, but the Canada-U.S. agreement is light years ahead of anything else that the U.S. would consider. It's not the same as an EU model, for example, as between the Europeans, but that's an entirely different agreement and arrangement that takes on a lot of other things. When you're talking about the United States and a reciprocal agreement with the United States, the Canada-U.S agreement is light years ahead of any others that the United States would have.