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House Hansard - 75

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 19, 2022 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 75 - May/19/22
Ms. Kristina Michaud (Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, BQ)
  • May/19/22 11:27:12 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will start by saying that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Jonquière. I am grateful for the opportunity to address this subject today. I was very happy to see the hon. member for Thornhill's motion. There is a lot of talk in the media and from our constituents about wait times for passports and delays at the airport. People pretty much everywhere, including in my riding, are eager to get back to normal. The pandemic is winding down, and people want to start travelling and visiting sun destinations again after two difficult years. That is why I think this is an important matter. Moreover, we have been in a pandemic for more than two years now. That has forced governments to implement measures that may have curtailed our freedoms, but that were needed because they were there to protect the health of the population. The Conservative Party has always opposed these measures. It has constantly tried to limit their scope. We saw this with the many questions they have asked in the House since the beginning of the 44th Parliament, as well as with the opposition days they devoted to the issue, when they demanded the immediate lifting of all measures. They did not adopt a gradual approach. They really wanted to lift all measures immediately. Although it is true that the Conservatives were pandering to libertarians on this matter, it is also true that the Liberals also did not hesitate to politicize the issue and to use unvaccinated people for political purposes. We saw this in the last election campaign. The government suddenly announced a vaccination requirement for all federal employees, while still refusing to present a plan for lifting the health measures. At every turn, the two parties accused each other of dividing the population, on the one hand with health measures, and on the other with disinformation. I think that it is crucial to avoid politicizing this issue. As members of the Bloc Québécois have said many times, the only thing we should do in this situation is listen to the science. We are not the experts. We must listen to the public health experts. As I mentioned earlier, the member's motion addresses problems at airports. Just this past Monday, the Canadian Press reported long lineups at airports and even said that it was taking four times longer to process incoming passengers than it had before the pandemic. It seems likely that the more travellers there are, the worse the problem will get. The Conservative Party is therefore asking the government to immediately revert to prepandemic travel rules and service levels. According to the Conservatives, the problem is the restrictions, the mandates they have been condemning for months. Their solution is to lift them all. In my opinion, the Conservative Party is misguided in laying all the blame for airport wait times on the COVID‑19 restrictions, when that is not necessarily the case. Just yesterday, the Customs and Immigration Union publicly called on the Minister of Public Safety and the Canada Border Services Agency to increase the number of border officers assigned to passenger operations at Canadian airports, in order to alleviate the pressure on both airport staff and passengers. Union president Mark Weber said that there are simply not enough officers. These delays are a source of frustration for everyone, but the union's solution is to bring in more officers, not to get rid of measures that are designed to keep the public and travellers healthy. The union said that this situation was foreseeable, noting, “Over the past decade, the number of officers assigned to passenger operations has decreased dramatically”. At present, at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, it is estimated that fewer than 300 officers are active in the passenger operations section, which is nearly half of the number needed to process inbound travellers in a timely manner. This is not unique to Toronto, either, with both Vancouver and Montreal facing similar issues. One sentence caught my attention in the press release I read this morning. To quote Mr. Weber: The reality is that even with the eventual lifting of current public health measures, significant delays will likely persist, not only due to the critical shortage of officers in most border operations across the country, but also due to an over-reliance on inefficient technologies. Mr. Weber said that an officer can process a traveller twice as fast as the automated primary inspection kiosks. Essentially, he attributes the excessive delays at the airports to the staffing shortage and the inefficient technology. At the end of the day, these delays should come as no surprise. They were foreseeable. Mr. Weber says that we could have seen them coming for the past 10 years, having watched the situation deteriorate. What he is asking the Minister of Public Safety and the Canada Border Services Agency to do is to add more staff. We are seeing the same issue in almost every domain. I met with representatives of the National Police Federation last week who told me the same thing: The police is short on human resources, staff and security officers, including at the borders and at airports. Lifting the health measures will not necessarily make the lines shorter. There needs to be more people on the job. I would like to come back to paragraph (iii) of the member for Thornhill's motion, which states that several countries “have moved to lift COVID‑19 restrictions at airports and other points of entry”. That may be true, but only partially. Some countries have gone ahead and lifted all restrictions, but most still have some restrictions in place, particularly when it comes to people who are unvaccinated. For instance, the United Kingdom and Ireland have lifted most of their measures. However, in France, only fully vaccinated travellers can arrive in the country without having to be tested, and those without proof of vaccination must show a negative test upon arrival. In the U.S., our biggest partner, travellers must be fully vaccinated in order to enter the country. It is the same in Spain. No matter what standard of comparison we use, I think that it is reasonable to say that so far, Canada has followed the science and public health advice on what should be done to protect the public. However, if anyone asked me whether the government has managed the borders properly since the start of the pandemic, I would instantly answer no. I refer to what my colleague from Abitibi—Témiscamingue said about the Auditor General's comments on border management over the last 27 months. There is a pretty long list of things that did not go well: a lack of border testing; a failure to respond properly to emerging new variants; a lack of quarantines during peak waves; a lack of service in French from testing companies; a lack of coordination with hotels to provide accommodation for quarantining travellers, and members will recall that the chaotic quarantine situation at hotels made the headlines several times; delays in getting test results, as many people took a test and sent it in, but never got the result, leaving them unsure about their status; no follow-up for travellers who complied with their quarantine; and a lack of staff to enforce the requirement to quarantine at home. I am not even going to delve into the passport saga because I will run out of time. Passport Canada is in total chaos right now. Call volumes have doubled or tripled because, as I said, people are itching to travel again. They realize that their passport expired and want it renewed quickly, but that is impossible because there is not enough staff. The fact that the government decided to keep these offices shut for so long, while public servants worked from home as a precaution, may also explain the current situation. In some cases, the government waited until May 17 to call employees back to work to open service points. This could have happened more quickly, considering that it has been demonstrated that certain businesses and service points could provide services to the public without endangering the workers. This government's failure to be proactive could very well explain this whole thing. Unfortunately, we are experiencing a labour shortage, which is why I do not fully agree with all the points raised in the Conservative Party's motion. As I said a little earlier when I asked the parliamentary secretary a question, I think we could work out a compromise instead of demanding the immediate lifting of all health measures, even it it is stressful to arrive at the airport and have to wait, and even if we are fed up with all that. We were very happy in Quebec when the mask mandate was lifted last week. I think it is still important to listen to and respect what public health experts are telling us. I believe that the government could come up with a plan for gradually lifting the health measures. The Bloc Québécois will therefore be moving an amendment to the member for Thornhill's motion to ensure that we can find common ground.
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