Madam Chair, good morning. Thank you for having us this morning. We have provided a deck, and I plan to go over the deck quickly. Then we'll welcome all the questions you may have. It's a pleasure to be here.
Essentially the Canada Border Services Agency is responsible to provide integrated border services at all Canadian borders to facilitate the flow of people and goods while ensuring the safety and security of Canada.
Our daily challenge is to balance the facilitation of trade and people while ensuring the safety and security of Canada. It's a daily challenge because we're faced with increasing volumes and a changing environment.
Essentially we're a workforce of 14,000 people that works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We span the country and have a footprint internationally. We operate and have staff in all modes of transport: marine, cruise ships and container facilities, rail, land borders, and airports. We also have personnel in three mail centres across the country.
We manage the flow of people and goods and protect the supply chain. We protect the safety and security of Canada, essentially in three business lines: customs activities; immigration enforcement and refugee processing; and food, plant and animal, ensuring food safety and enforcing any legislation that has to do with food, plant and animal.
We do it essentially to ensure that commercial goods and conveyance are processed in an efficient manner. We ensure trade partners are compliant with applicable legislation requirements and measures. We increase the processing efficiency of low-risk, pre-approved trade partners. We have different programs whereby we pre-approve trade partners so we have an ability to have a low-touch approach when goods cross the border.
In the business line we have we process international travellers coming to our borders. We process commercial goods. We are also responsible for trade and anti-dumping activities. CBSA is the organization that's responsible for tariff classification, for the origin and valuation of goods that are imported, and for conducting anti-dumping investigations.
Our fourth business line is enforcement and intelligence, having an ability to focus on what we view as being high risk and expediting as quickly as possible what we deem to be low risk.
As I said, our daily challenge is balancing everything, but we are facing increasing volumes. Air travellers have increased in the last five years by 25%; commercial imports by 27%; postal imports by 151%—mainly due to e-commerce—and courier shipments by 10%.
We are seeing an increase in all modes. We have to deal with the complexity and facility of travel.
We don't deal with it on our own. We have many stakeholders: the shipping industry, the truck association, airport authorities, bridge and tunnel operators. We have a panoplie, as we say in French, of stakeholders with which we have, I would say, daily conversations, to be able to keep everything in equilibrium and make sure that the service expected by the trading community is up to par and to the level they expect.
Maybe I can turn it over to Johny to cover our commercial modernization, and then I'll try to wrap it up.