Thank you very much to the chair for the opportunity to present remarks on Bill C-21, which we believe is a fundamental cornerstone to the automated and more efficient way borders are managed for Canada.
As you mentioned, I'm an executive board member of the Canadian/American Border Trade Alliance. It's a group that has celebrated its 25th anniversary this year as a binational grassroots organization representing a number of public and private sector organizations. They're involved in Canadian and American trade, border crossing, transportation, tourism, airports, and bridge operators, among others.
As a voluntary board member for Can/Am BTA, I should also add that I have professionally worked for 20 years in all forms of border management between the U.S. and Canada, with my firm InterVISTAS consulting, specializing in different kinds of movements. Some members of the committee have seen my past work as the independent reviewer of the current pre-clearance act that was tabled in the House of Commons. I've also looked at the root causes of border delay, and that pertains to both goods movement and people movements.
The Canadian/American Border Trade Alliance is in full support of the provisions of Bill C-21, in terms of being able to have exit information that is recorded when individuals leave the country. As many have already testified before this committee, the intent of being able to expand the current capabilities that have been deployed since 2013 to provide information on Canadian citizens to support a range of different objectives on a restricted basis is that this biographic information on Canadians is going to be important to be able to close the loop in terms of the set of entries and exits from Canada. As we have seen in reports from the operating agencies, some 20 million records have already been looked at so far.
In granting new powers to government to be able to perform these kinds of activities, we always look at this in three ways. First, will this capability provide the ability for governments to better manage our borders, particularly the perimeter around the U.S. and Canada? Second, are there opportunities for efficiencies to be created to allow folks working for CBSA and IRCC to do more with what they currently have as resources? Third, from the Can/Am Border Trade Alliance perspective, are there opportunities to facilitate trade and travel?
Growth is continuing, particularly for international visitors and air travel, over 5% per annum over the next 20 years, as forecasted. In terms of being able to provide the capability for Canada to take the recommendations of groups such as ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization, in terms of recommended practices, certainly these are opportunities that are available for the Government of Canada to pursue facilitated efficiencies.
Imagine the age-old question that you face when you cross the border as to how long you have been away, and the amount of work to manually swipe passports and look at that particular question, and converting that to more productive types of questions, to be able to look at the kinds of people going across the borders.
As mentioned by other witnesses to the committee, Canada is not the first country to look at this. There are lessons to be learned from other countries that have sought to implement exit immigration data. I'll cite a couple of them.
In addition to the United States, recently the United Kingdom implemented the border systems program, which took effect in mid-2015. That represented a 20-year shift in the U.K. in terms of the way exit information is looked at. Prior to 1994, that was done through an exit booth when leaving the U.K. On departure, you would actually see an immigration person. As in a number of countries around the world, that was the mechanism. However, over the period of time of automating that capability and into mid-2015, the U.K. Home Office worked very closely with different port operators and airlines to be able to implement this. It very well might be a model to look at the provisions of implementing exit and entry from the Beyond the Border action plan. The issues were fairly limited.
Contrasting this was the move this past summer in the EU in putting forward a set of regulations in response to a number of attacks, in Paris and Brussels namely, and being able to have states in the Schengen area required to provide tracking of entry and exit information. In this case, the deployment was horrible by all accounts. Between May and June 2017, the number of delays was 97% greater than in 2016. In a number of countries, France and Spain namely, the delays in border formalities in August 2017 could reach up to two hours.
That is not the model to pursue because the ability to systematically and cohesively deploy this, as we have seen since the 2013 decision to provide a test of exit data, is certainly something that we've seen here in the experience to date. Granted, scaling this upwards is a different challenge, and certainly we're confident the agencies looking at this will have the ability to keep an eye on the ball to make sure delays aren't in place.
Interestingly, the world leader in this area, Australia, pioneered the approaches in the 1990s for advanced passenger processing. One of the first countries to fully automate the data in looking at arrivals, in April 2016, Australia moved ahead with what they called outward advanced passenger processing. This itself provided a similar capability to be able to have exit data put in place. Based on a long history of working collaboratively with the airlines toward implementation, that went fairly smoothly. I will also add that in my earlier remarks about finding facilitation benefits, Australia has a broader vision into the future. Its 2015 seamless traveller initiative has as its viewpoint being able to facilitate over 90% of travellers without stopping at a booth.
At Can/Am BTA we look at these examples and we applaud this. Where do we go from here? We would suggest three things to this committee to be looked at.
Number one is making sure that the border technologies being deployed are compatible with the powers that are provided in C-21. Although C-21 is limited to documents for outbound international travel or data coming in from CBP, we see a number of countries like Australia and the United States moving very rapidly toward biometric entry systems in addition to exit. While that's not the scope of C-21, it is certainly a progression and future that needs to be evaluated.
Number two, the passports that Canada uses do not have that ability for quick reading. Namely, the advantages of secure vicinity RFID is a technology available at a number of border crossings and that needs to be expanded greatly into the document itself.
Number three, and I can expand on this during questions from the committee, while ensuring that privacy is protected in terms of data, there are opportunities with the new Canadian centre on transportation data to be able to look at what this data source could help with on an anonymized basis. I reside in Vancouver, where there is a growing Vancouver-Victoria-Seattle tourism triangle. The ability to understand exits and departures much like cruise ships from Halifax and leaving by air for the United States, that source of information is currently a bit grey. There are opportunities other than this one that could provide advantages to both industry and government to understand those patterns of travel.
I look forward to questions from the committee.
