International Trade committee  Yes.

International Trade committee  I think you put the officers in place to process the travellers as they come through one at a time and use those resources, rather than having them help complete an app that, clearly, people are having a very difficult time completing.

International Trade committee  Rigaud College has an 18-week program. Then there's one year of essentially apprenticeship before you become a full officer.

International Trade committee  That's correct, yes.

International Trade committee  That is absolutely the case. As I said, our officers go through all of this training specifically on how to enforce the law, interdiction indicators and all of those kinds of things, and it's essentially not being used. When I use the term “IT consultants”, that's pretty close to

International Trade committee  We were not consulted at all on anything that was planned or rolled out. Again, you would think that they would ask the people who work on the border every day how best to do things at the border, but that simply wasn't the case.

International Trade committee  Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. My name is Mark Weber. I'm the national president of the Customs and Immigration Union, which represents personnel working for the Canada Border Ser

International Trade committee  Thank you very much for the question. Our staffing shortages are severe. They exist across the country in every mode, at ports of entry and outside of ports of entry as well. One of the bigger problems we have currently is that we only use the one training centre for our recrui

International Trade committee  Thank you. We actually don't. We've not been consulted. We were not consulted when ArriveCAN was first made a requirement. We were not consulted on how it should be laid out. We weren't really consulted on what's going to happen once it's made optional or how that's going to loo

International Trade committee  It's difficult for us to say. We only deal with travellers when they're returning to Canada, so what's going on the other way is really difficult for us to comment on. Again, when the ArriveCAN app was in place, the greatest difficulty that we had was that people simply didn't k

International Trade committee  Well, the bad news is that our contract has actually expired now. Were we in a legal strike position at the time, obviously I don't know where that would have gone, but I can say that our officers have absolutely gone above and beyond to make things flow as quickly as possible ag

International Trade committee  No, we didn't. The number of people who were arriving at the border without having completed the application was fairly consistent.

International Trade committee  If it's simply a matter of confirming that people are vaccinated, that can be done much more simply than having to complete a separate application. Surely there's a way whereby we can get the information that someone is or is not vaccinated when a passport is scanned, since we're

International Trade committee  It is constantly renewed. We go through a lengthy program of training at Rigaud. We learn throughout our careers. We try different modes, we specialize, and we join different teams. You're right that it's all about that interaction, that ability to read indicators, and to be ab

International Trade committee  I would say it did, yes.