moved:
That, in the opinion of the House, the government has failed to take all necessary steps to ensure that the US Administration and the US Congress fully understand the critical importance of our shared border to trade and economic security in both Canada and the United States; and must ensure that the Canada-U.S. border remains an efficient gateway through which our national security, personal, and commercial interests are properly promoted and defended.
Mr. Speaker, for most Canadians, when we think of the Canada-U.S. border, we think about our travel back and forth and the times we may have visited, often spontaneously.
Certainly I, as a child, when visiting my grandparents in Windsor, would often cross the Detroit border on a whim with my parents to go shopping, or sometimes we would go to Buffalo. I certainly have many constituents who will travel across the border to catch a Buffalo Bills game. It is that sort of spontaneous relationship that most people think about.
Really, we do not often stop to consider the power of our relationship and exactly what it means to both of our economies. In a time when the economy is softening, particularly here in North America but across the world, it is something important to reflect upon.
We know the United States and Canada are each other's largest trading partners, but I think it is important to reflect upon the fact that 39 of the 50 U.S. states list Canada as their number one trading partner, that 86% of Canada's exports go to the United States, yet conversely only 23% of U.S. exports go to Canada. In fact, for my home province of Ontario, that number is even larger, with 92% of Ontario exports going south to the U.S. border.
We know that 44% of the U.S. population lives within a day's drive of southern Ontario, that bilateral trade between our two countries totals $570 billion Canadian, $435 billion U.S., and that some six million jobs are directly supported by bilateral trade in both Canada and the U.S. We know Canada is the United States' largest supplier of energy. We know the Detroit-Windsor border crossing is the busiest of any border crossing in the world. We know that 300,000 travellers cross the Canada-U.S. border every day; that is some 35,000 trucks each and every day. It is a massive relationship.
I mentioned before that relationship, which so many jobs are dependent upon, particularly in southern Ontario but right across Canada. We are seeing that come under threat. Part of that threat certainly is the downturn in the economy. We know that from February 2008 until February 2009 we have seen a 20% decrease in bilateral trade between our two countries. That has had a huge impact.
No small amount of impact is being felt by the inaction of the Conservative government and its refusal to stand up on a number of key issues. I am going to start, if I can, with the western hemisphere travel initiative.
I think it is important to note that less than 30% of U.S. citizens hold a valid passport, yet the restriction that will come in this June will mean that U.S. citizens have to have a passport in order to cross our border. If we go back to the example I gave early, on regarding Canadians going south, it works with Americans coming north.
I talked about the number of people, 130 million U.S. citizens living within a day's drive of southern Ontario. A lot of them are coming to places like the Niagara region, to spend their dollars for tourism. These are not trips they plan for a long time but trips they undertake perhaps on a whim, maybe at the end of a week, saying “Let's go to a winery,” or “Let's go catch a festival at Stratford,” or “Let's go to Toronto to watch a ball game”. That kind of spontaneous travel accounts for a huge amount of trade.
With this passport restriction, there is going to be a major impediment. People who are considering spontaneous travel, instead of going to the Niagara region, as an example, are going to say, because they now require a passport, “Well, let's just stay at home or consider a U.S. option”.
Yet the options were pretty clear for the government. One clear option was the Olympics. We have the Olympics, which are going to be coming to Vancouver, and the eyes of the world are going to be focused on Vancouver and that region. One would have expected that the government would be making the argument to U.S. legislators to push off, at the very least, the implementation of this passport requirement until after the Olympics.
In fact, when I was in Washington and had the opportunity to talk with many different governors and many different congressmen and senators, a lot of them were surprised that this point had never been raised with them, that the idea of pushing it until after the Olympics was something that had not been raised by Canadian officials.
To me, that is shocking. Here is an example where we can say to the United States, “Do we want the focus of the world to be the gridlock and mayhem that will happen at the Canada-U.S. border crossing near Vancouver?”
Instead we should be trying to ensure that for all those U.S. citizens who want to come and enjoy the Olympics, to cheer on their team, they should have the opportunity to cross that border without the sudden shock of realizing they are going to be turned away because they do not have a passport.
Another point which is important to consider is that many U.S. legislators have been coming up with ideas that they themselves are surprised the government has not echoed. Congresswoman Louise Slaughter raised a couple of important ideas when I met with her. One was the idea of a day pass or a casual travel pass that would allow someone access to the country for a couple of days with some additional requirements. That has not been pursued, yet when we talk about the importance of that spontaneous travel back and forth, it is surprising it is not something that has been echoed here, that we have not reached out to her and tried to work with U.S. officials to bring that initiative forward.
In some cases the provinces have been the leaders in trying to find solutions while the federal government refuses to take action. In British Columbia, Premier Campbell has worked very closely with Governor Gregoire of Washington on developing an enhanced driver's licence. They recognized that because the federal government was refusing to take action to try to push that June date, they had to try to find an alternative solution. They worked on enhanced driver's licences. There are some privacy concerns which have to be sorted out, but at least they are taking the initiative. Why that initiative was not grabbed nationally I do not know, but certainly it has been grabbed by Premier Charest in the province of Quebec and by Premier McGuinty in the province of Ontario. They are working with their northern counterparts in the United States to actively find solutions to make sure that the June implementation will not have a devastating impact on our bilateral trade.
The area that is the biggest concern to me is the lack of the government's response to the erroneous facts we have seen emanating out of the United States for a long time. I will go over some of them, and most specifically, because it is the most recent example and because it is by homeland security Secretary Napolitano, I am going to quote from an interview she had on April 20 with CBC correspondent Neil Macdonald. Then I will talk about the government's response.
Secretary Napolitano said:
...we're no longer going to have this fiction that there's no longer a border between Canada and the United States....
I know that the pattern at the Canadian border has been informality. But borders are important for immigration purposes. They're also important for crime purposes...terrorism.
She went on to say in an address to a Washington audience:
[O]ne of the things that I think we need to be sensitive to is the very real feeling among the southern border states and on Mexico, that if things are being done on the Mexican border, they should be done on the Canadian border.
She was speaking to the issue that the Canadian border and the Mexican border should be treated with equivalence. Secretary Napolitano has repeated this again and again. It is something that is deeply concerning when we see the Americans move obviously to very extreme measures in dealing with Mexico. The idea there is any kind of equivalency would have a devastating non-tariff barrier impact on trade and obviously on travel. She said one thing of most concern in an interview and I will quote the entire passage because I think it is relevant. It starts with the reporter asking:
You know 6,000 civilians were killed in drug violence in Mexico last year. They export kidnappings. I think we can all agree that's not happening in Saskatchewan. Why the need for the same level of security on the Canadian border as the Mexican border given two drastically different realities?
Secretary Napolitano responded:
Look, the comment you read of course was taken out of context. The law doesn't differentiate. The law says the borders are the borders and these kinds of things that have to be done at the borders.
Secondly, yes, Canada is not Mexico, it doesn't have a drug war going on.... Nonetheless, to the extent that terrorists have come into our country or suspected or known terrorists have entered the country across a border, it's been across the Canadian border. There are real issues there.
That is a pretty remarkable statement. The reporter continued her questioning:
Are you talking about the 9/11 perpetrators?
Secretary Napolitano:
Not just those but others as well. So again, every country is entitled to have a border. It's part of sovereignty.
What is remarkable about this is that she does not just allude to the myth that 9/11 terrorists came across the border from Canada, which in fact is a complete falsehood, but she also talks about the extent to which terrorists enter into the U.S. by crossing the border from Canada.
The government's response on this was to say, “I don't believe there is an effort to change the level of security at the Canadian border”. That came from the public safety minister.
In fact when I questioned the minister in the House, the minister said that the secretary corrected herself. He is right. She corrected herself on one fact, in that the 9/11 terrorists did not come from Canada. Yet on all the other statements she remains steadfast. In fact, even after her statement about 9/11 in which she was extremely clear that she thought at that moment in time that the 9/11 terrorists came from Canada, she did not yield any of the other facts she quoted. In fact, even after issuing a statement correcting the 9/11 terrorist myth, she said, “There are other instances, however, when suspected terrorists have attempted to enter our country from Canada into the United States”. She also said, “Some of these are well known to the public, such as the millennium bomber, while others are not, due to security reasons”.
The millennium bomber incident was 10 years ago. That person was apprehended at the border successfully and charges were pursued. The person was dealt with and did not get across the border. The only example the Americans can point to is a decade old, an example frankly where Canada succeeded in getting the individual who was responsible.
This myth is continuing to be repeated. As late as last Friday, Senator John McCain came to Napolitano's defence by saying, “Some of the 9/11 hijackers did come from Canada, as you know”. Senator McCain who was the leader of the Republican Party is coming to Secretary Napolitano's defence by saying that her original statement was in fact accurate. In fact when I was in Washington and spoke with legislators, this myth was repeated to me several times by different congressman who said that they would like to have a more open border with Canada but they have to be careful because the 9/11 terrorists came from Canada.
This myth continues to stand out there and yet the government's response is to ignore it and to say the Americans made a correction and we do not need to worry about it, that we can move on. The government refuses to confront it.
In 2004 the 9/11 commission reported that all the 9/11 terrorists arrived in the United States from outside North America. They flew into U.S. airports and entered the U.S. with documents issued by the United States government. Of course, no 9/11 terrorists came from Canada. Yet Napolitano's predecessor, homeland secretary Michael Chertoff, said last year that more than a dozen suspected extremists had been caught trying to enter the U.S. via Canada. There is no evidence. Senator Hillary Clinton said, “There needs to be tighter security at the Canada-U.S. border because of the perceived 9/11 fall down”.
We see again and again this myth being repeated. In the United States, even the government's own ambassador has said, “It frequently comes from members of Congress. These are people who should know the difference but forget it sometimes. It is frustrating to us because we have to address it every time the matter comes up”. The ambassador has to address it because in the House of Commons we have a Minister of Public Safety who does not think there is a problem, who thinks that that correction fixes everything and that we do not need to worry about going on an offensive.
The government's silence on this issue costs us dearly because these myths pervade. Our silence and our inability to stand up and speak for our country, to defend our interests and to explain clearly that Canada has obviously taken clear action to make sure that our border is every bit as safe as the American border, that a terrorist is just as likely to fly into Cleveland to attack Boston as to fly into Toronto, that our security interests are collective, that our failure to repeat that refrain at every opportunity, to launch an all-out PR offensive is costing us dearly. It is allowing the creation of thicker and thicker borders which greatly jeopardize our trading relationship.
The other issue I want to talk about briefly, aside from all of those wrong facts and the government's inability to correct them, is the government's lack of interest in dealing with the incredible amount of profiling that is going on at the border and to deal with those individuals who are facing huge concerns.
To this day, former member of Parliament Omar Alghabra is not allowed to cross the border without being fingerprinted and photographed because he has a dual citizenship with Syria. Not so long ago, a large group of Tamil constituents were detained for some nine hours at the border. We are hearing again and again from all kinds of Canadians who are trying to cross the border that profiling is costing them dearly. Many simply are making the decision that the trip is not worth it. The government's inaction on that is deeply disturbing.
The government's real action on the border has been twofold. First, as has been broadly reported, it has made cuts to the Canada Border Services Agency. Second, it took action to arm border guards, as if that would be the solution to our trading problem. It is going to cost us around $1 billion. It is going to take 10 years. It is against the advice of the RCMP. Yet, the government continues to plow forward with arming border guards as if that somehow is going to solve all of these problems.
Of course, that is not going to solve the problem. What is going to solve the problem is doing what the government has failed to do. In their close relationship with the Republicans, the Conservatives failed to create a relationship with the Democrats when they came to power. They failed to aggressively work with the Obama administration to ensure that we move forward on some of the great initiatives we had under successive Liberal governments, whether it was the smart border initiatives or others, to expand that relationship, move it forward and see an opening of our borders.
When I talk to companies like General Motors, and we all know the problems General Motors is going through, one of the biggest problems is just in time delivery, the ability to get goods and services across the border as quickly as possible. When companies encounter these delays and see a thickening of the border, it means the viability of their operations in Canada is threatened. All of the jobs that are so dependent upon that relationship are put into peril.
Clearly, the government needs to be working much more closely with the Obama administration. It needs to be speaking with a strong voice for Canadian interests and standing up to misinformation rather than standing in the House and saying that the United States has made a minor correction and that we should not worry about it. The government needs to take these things seriously. Certainly, it needs to be diverting resources away from the wasteful billion dollar exercise of arming border guards that will not enhance security one bit and instead utilize that money to make our border more effective. The government needs to make sure that we secure the North American perimeter and make it as safe as possible.
With all of the money that has been poured into the Canada-U.S. border by the United States to try to thicken things up, one has to look at what that has led to. If one looks at the budget of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, the CBP, over the last five years it has almost doubled to $11 billion. Since September 11, 2001 it has more than quadrupled the number of border patrol agents along the northern border as well as tripled the customs inspectors to more than 5,000.
However, the Hearst group looked through public records provided by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse as a public U.S. interest group. Its analysis found that of all national security and terrorism charges filed in the federal court districts along the northern border since 2001, only three were based on referrals by the CBP. That is just referrals. All of that money spent chasing after trying to enhance and thicken the border to make it tougher to get across has led to three referrals.
Whether or not we look at the softwood lumber deal, the auto crisis, the country of origin labelling legislation, the international trafficking in arms regulation, or to our border, the government is failing. It is failing to stand up for Canadian interests. It is failing to make sure that goods and services flow freely across our border. It is costing jobs. It is time the government got the job done.