Mr. Speaker, I rise again this evening to speak about the Canadian border.
Let me recap last week. On Monday, there was a CBSA outage at the border; on Tuesday, there was a CBSA outage at the border; on Wednesday, there was a CBSA outage at the border; on Thursday, there was a CBSA outage at the border. Let me remind everyone what that means. That means goods are not being cleared for import, goods are not being cleared for export, just-in-time deliveries are missed, food is not delivered, consumers are lost and customers are lost.
I asked the CBSA in a written question to tell me how many border outages have taken place over the last several years, because I wanted to get a sense of the scope of this issue that I have been hearing about. Here is the response: “The Canada Border Services Agency concluded that producing and validating a comprehensive response to this question would require a manual collection of information that is not possible in the time allotted”.
The CBSA had 45 days to do this. That response from the agency is simply unacceptable.
If it is true, how can the CBSA solve a problem that it cannot even identify or quantify? I will note that the response was signed by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety. However, we know that response is not true. I will not presume the intention of the agency, but I can tell the House that the answer is not true. How do I know it is not true? It is because someone else did the work that the CBSA said was not possible. The Canadian International Freight Forwarders Association reports that as of November 27, there have been 117 system outages this year alone, 69 failures, 39 maintenance outages, five system changes and four holiday issues. In a letter to the Minister of Public Safety just last week, the association said, “Minister—this is simply unacceptable.” I agree. It is unacceptable.
My very simple question to the parliamentary secretary is this. What is causing the high frequency of outages, why are they continuing to happen and when will they end?