Public Safety committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you here today. My name is Mark Weber. I'm the national president of the Customs and Immigration Union, which represents personnel working for the CBSA. CIU has a long h

Public Safety committee  Okay. I'll keep speaking. At the marine level, the overall reporting infrastructure is both insufficient and outdated. Once again, officers lack the necessary tools and authority to intervene, impacting their ability to intercept dangerous goods. Perhaps most glaring of all are

Public Safety committee  Thank you.

Public Safety committee  The numbers that are being added, as far as we can tell, are covering attrition, so the actual overall number of frontline officers is not currently going up. We still have several ports that are running pretty much predominantly on overtime. In places like Windsor, it's almost u

Public Safety committee  Thank you for your question. Given the complexity of the issue, I'll respond in English, in order to be as clear as possible. In terms of whether the CBSA has the financial ability to hire a thousand more officers, that would not be for me to answer. What I can say is that the

Public Safety committee  Thank you for the question. No, we've not received an answer. You've identified a lot of the concerns that we brought up as well. If I could provide an example of port runners currently, if someone drives through the port, we have no ability to stop them. All we do is call the

Public Safety committee  I can't speak for them. I'm hoping my presence here will help with that awareness. We have significant gaps, I would say, in rail likely more than anywhere else. Currently, we don't really have rail examination capabilities at first port of arrival in Canada. Trains that, for i

Public Safety committee  Thank you for the question. Definitely more people would be needed at land border crossings. As I said, we have borders that couldn't operate without overtime. For rail operations, where we really have no ability to do any kind of searches at our borders, I think the infrastructu

Public Safety committee  It's more human resources and building the infrastructure to allow us to do those searches. Currently, at most crossings in Canada, there is nothing there for us to do the search. We have to take the car off. It's more than just opening the door and having a peek inside. It's q

Public Safety committee  Absolutely, that is a role that we would like to participate in. We're not saying that we want to participate in it to the exclusion of the RCMP, but to participate more than we are doing now. Our involvement is very little, I could say, in marine mode. Even when we're invited ou

Public Safety committee  You have 10 seconds. How would you like to use them, Mr. Van Popta?

Public Safety committee  Thank you for the question. That I'm aware of, no.

Public Safety committee  Thank you. I heard the comments about increased technology and putting some of the money towards intelligence, which makes sense, but all of that doesn't achieve anything unless there's someone there to actually do the search, to open and look into the rail car. That's really wh

Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  That's correct, yes.