Madam Speaker, I want the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader to imagine with me for a moment perhaps something unthinkable: that he or someone he knows is in a terrible car accident. We hope that would never happen to any member of the House or, in fact, any Canadian. Thankfully, in this unfortunate situation, the parliamentary secretary is extricated from his vehicle, loaded into an ambulance and taken to the nearest emergency room. Unfortunately, when he gets to the emergency room door, there is a sign saying that it is closed until further notice.
It is not hyperbole to say that this is what is happening at our border every week. Our border systems, which are critical for moving goods, food, medicine and essentials for Canadians every week, are now experiencing an unprecedented number of technical difficulties and outages. In fact, there was an outage on Monday, one on Tuesday, and if members can believe, there is an outage going on right now. It started at 2:56 p.m. this afternoon, and as of just a moment ago, before I got up to speak, it was still ongoing. The CBSA states that it is “actively working to resolve this issue, but we currently do not have an estimated time for its resolution.” We cannot make this up.
The Canadian International Freight Forwarders Association has been keeping track and says that the border is now experiencing one outage every week at least. These are not maintenance outages, but unplanned outages that are shutting the border down. What this means in practice is that goods cannot be cleared for import and goods cannot be cleared for export. There was a multi-day standstill at the border at the end of September, and the border came to a near complete standstill. Critical goods needed for just-in-time delivery were not delivered, and food and other perishables were not delivered, costing untold millions in lost time, productivity and delays.
The Private Motor Truck Council of Canada said, “the current situation is untenable and needs to be rectified in short order.” Likewise, the Canadian Trucking Alliance said, “We simply cannot have the movement of thousands of trucks come to a crawl at international border crossings, while giving another signal to the international business community that Canada is not open for business”.
My questions for the hon. parliamentary secretary to the government House leader are these: What is causing the high frequency of these outages? Why are they continuing to happen? When will they end?