Thank you for your question.
I find it interesting that the union is saying that officers could patrol between border crossings as early as tomorrow if a certain order in council from 1981 didn't exist, while thousands of agents are still needed.
You can't do everything at the same time. We carry out our mandate every day at ports of entry.
We work side by side with the RCMP, who is carrying out it's mandate. If the government provided CBSA with the resources and the mandate to do that, we would. That's not my area of focus right now. My focus is on the ports of entry, our people internationally, the marine ports and inland. We have 200 investigators. That is my focus.
So it's a little easy to say that this order in council is the only thing preventing us from doing that. We carry out our mandate at ports of entry across the country and around the world.
Thank you for asking me this question and for giving me the opportunity to clarify certain things about a comment that, from my point of view, was somewhat simplistic.