Mr. Speaker, I join the minister today in congratulating and commending all the customs agents and people at our borders who are working as hard as they can to do their jobs as effectively as they can. The minister is right to take the time to congratulate them for their hard work and effort.
More important, the minister identified areas on which the government will focus to solve some of the problems we have at our border crossings. He mentioned the need of customs agents, who are at the frontline of attack, to be able to both identify potential high risk people going across the border and facilitate the commerce part of things. I think that is of concern to a lot of Canadians.
However we hear from a lot of our customs agents at the border that one of their biggest problems is lack of resources. As the minister has mentioned, even though we have added more customs agents at the border their tools and resources for doing their jobs are limited. Unfortunately this results in the fact that they cannot be as thorough as they potentially could be.
The minister mentioned new technologies and a few other things for addressing the issue. Could the minister be more specific in the House today and give us an exact numerical value for these resources? What specific tools will he be giving to our agents at the frontline to allow them to do their jobs more effectively?