I'll give you an example, based on Mr. Reed's experience. This would be for a Canadian who owns an American vehicle.
I live in Alberta, and there are a lot of Albertans who own cottages in Montana. For example, you own an American-plated Montana Jeep. You decide you are going to do repairs on it and put it on a trailer and try to drive it back to, say, Lethbridge or Calgary, to your own shop perhaps. There are quite a few people in my riding who like to do that.
You're not allowed to bring your Jeep into Canada without formally importing it and then paying a 6.1% import duty as if you are going to bring it into Canada and keep it here. That's not what many of my constituents and Mr. Reed want to do; they want to temporarily bring their vehicles into Canada.
Currently, there are no rules that allow someone to do that without paying the full import fee. That has been confirmed to me by the Library of Parliament, and by the Minister of Transport and civil servants in Transport Canada.
As I said, it's a very niche issue—very, very unusual. If it's a Canadian citizen who owns the vehicle, they should be allowed to bring in this American-plated vehicle for just a few days. I don't imagine that people bring them in for months on end for regular residential or commercial use. It would just be for doing repairs or upgrades to the vehicle and then sending it back across the border.
You could impose a system of fines on individuals who break the rules. It would be very easy to track the vehicles, because at the border you'd collect all the regular information.
Mr. Reed proposed a few systems on this. The minister responded to him and said that non-compliant vehicles—these are older vehicles, typically pre-1979—wouldn't be allowed into the country because they're not considered safe. I reminded the minister in a separate communication that we're talking about compliant vehicles.
For the Jeep example I gave you, a regular vehicle used on the road.... If you're like me, you like going to the back country where there is no cellphone service and nothing really out there. You take your Jeep. You might damage it while going bogging. You're going to bring it back to your place. If you do it in Montana and you don't want to pay exorbitant mechanics fees or don't have the tools to do it there, you'd perhaps bring it back to your home in Canada, fix it there, and then take it back to the United States, where it belongs, because it's plated in an American jurisdiction.
I mentioned the response from the minister, from February 26, 2016, which mentions this. I just want to read to you a short paragraph from the minister:
As you pointed out, the temporary use of a U.S.-certified and registered vehicle in Canada by a Canadian citizen is an infrequent occurrence. However, as this option may be of interest to some Canadians, Transport Canada officials will review options to possibly address this situation. Any potential solution would require legislative changes and would take time to develop, approve, communicate and implement.
However, I have had no news whatsoever, and there is no information available anywhere on whether that review has taken place. The minister has not told me—