44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 19, 2022 10:00AM
- 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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- May/19/22 11:58:19 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise. I will be sharing my time with the excellent member for Vancouver Kingsway this morning.
It is a pleasure to rise and speak about the situation in our major airports, a situation that I think by now pretty much every Canadian across the country is familiar with. It is a situation that is chaotic, and it is a situation that is having real impacts on a lot of people.
For over two years, Canadians were asked to put off travel plans. They could not visit family members; they missed major life events; they had to cancel long-awaited holidays; they could not travel to other parts of Canada or other parts of the world. People made significant sacrifices to protect each other, to protect their loved ones and to protect their communities. They helped buy time for frontline health workers before we had vaccines, and they kept it up when new variants emerged and threatened to derail our collective efforts. The vast majority of Canadians did their part, and for that they deserve our thanks.
With many restrictions now lifted, people are excited to travel again, which is understandable, and they are returning to our airports in huge numbers. Last week, an average of 120,000 travellers went through our major airports each day. That is a huge number, but once at the airports, they are being stuck in long screening lines. Planes are stuck on the tarmac without passengers able to leave. People are missing flights, and much more. Of course, people are rightly frustrated by this situation. These delays are creating stress and anxiety for travellers and they need to be addressed. This situation was foreseeable. It has been going on for weeks and the government needs to fix it.
Why is this happening? As we heard at the transport committee from the Canadian Airports Council, the biggest factor is staffing, especially the lack of screening personnel needed to move passengers through security. Screening capacity is a federal responsibility through the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, CATSA.
Like many sectors of our economy, aspects of the air transport sector have struggled to rehire employees laid off earlier in the pandemic, and we have heard about that challenge in today's debate already. As the hospitality industry has experienced, some staff simply are not available to hire back because they have moved on to other positions with better work conditions, better compensation and better terms of employment. The minister needs to ensure that the terms of employment related to these positions, the positions at our airports that are needed to screen passengers, are adequate to attract and retain the skilled workforce that we need to ensure safe air travel for all those who fly.
The other issue, of course, is the fact that the pandemic is still very much with us, and it is hard to maintain staffing levels when employees are catching COVID and leaving work because they are sick.
The government should have been able to predict that these challenges would emerge. It should have hired sufficient staff, and if it struggled to find people to do the work, it should have reviewed the terms of those positions to ensure that they are competitive and able to attract and retain the people it needs.
The Liberal government first announced it was relaxing travel restrictions on February 15, with mandatory arrival testing and quarantine scrapped at the end of February. Liberals were happy to go around saying how exciting it was that travel was back and Canada was reopening in time for the tourism season, but over three months have passed since those announcements, and it is clear that the government has not done enough to ensure that our airports are ready. Now Canadians are facing the consequences of the government's mismanagement and lack of preparedness. This was entirely avoidable. It should have been anticipated and it needs to be fixed.
We have seen the same mishandling from the government with passport applications. I am sure everyone in the House has heard from constituents who are facing incredibly lengthy delays and long lines at Service Canada offices because the government failed to anticipate an increase in demand for travel when the restrictions were relaxed. The same folks who were left scrambling to get their passports on time a few weeks ago are now at the airport experiencing long lines at security screening. They are frustrated and anxious because of the delays they are seeing.
Instead of acknowledging the government’s failure to prepare, the transport minister had the audacity to blame the travellers themselves, saying that it was their lack of practice and the slowness with which they took the liquids out of their bags that were leading to these long delays at the airport. Frankly, that is offensive.
Shifting to the riding I represent, I am particularly mindful of tourism operators in northwest B.C. and across Canada, who have looked forward to a season of welcoming back clientele from across Canada and around the world. I think of operators in the Bulkley Valley, the Bella Coola Valley, Haida Gwaii and Prince Rupert. They are looking forward to finally getting their business back, and the last thing they need is their clients hearing that travelling to Canada is a hassle because of the delays at our airports. That is going to hurt the tourism business right across Canada, and it needs to be addressed.
The Conservatives have brought this forward because they see a very particular opportunity in this crisis, which is the opportunity to once again try their hand at removing every health measure, every restriction and every tool we have to protect Canadians and safeguard our country against future waves of the virus. We disagree with that approach.
We disagree because the pandemic is still very much with us and because there are some public health measures, we believe, that are likely still advisable for the ongoing protection of Canadians and the detection of the virus at our border. Most of all, we disagree because we believe important public health measures should be informed by public health science, not by politics.
The motion before us makes the claim that Canada’s international allies are removing all travel restrictions. Simply put, that is not the case. Just to the south of us, the United States still requires a predeparture COVID test. That is more restrictive than here in Canada. Almost every country requires proof of vaccination to enter. Saying that our international allies are lifting all restrictions is simply not accurate.
We have an opportunity to strike a balance between enabling the mobility of Canadians and keeping in place tools that allow us to respond to future public health threats. The question is, do the current pandemic travel measures strike the right balance? Are they defensible? Are they based on the best available evidence? How are they better than other, similar measures that have been proposed as alternatives? This is where the blame goes back to the Liberal government, which has been less than forthcoming of late when it comes to these pandemic measures.
In fact, the NDP wrote to Dr. Tam in March and called on her to conduct a full re-evaluation of Canada’s pandemic measures and report back to Canadians. The letter from the member for Vancouver Kingsway and the member for Elmwood—Transcona simply highlighted that creating trust in public health measures requires explaining the arguments and sharing the evidence on which they are based.
I have asked questions on this topic in this very debate today. I have asked the government to tell us when it will be reporting back from its review and how that information will be shared with Canadians, yet we do not get a response.
The questions are growing. Just last week, infectious disease expert Dr. Zain Chagla from McMaster University published an article stating that, in his view, Canada’s “current rules for travel do not make sense”. A few days ago, a Globe and Mail editorial asked whether the measures in place are still needed.
The government needs to be more transparent with Canadians about the evidence behind any remaining public health measures. It needs to clearly communicate the data and the science informing these decisions. The government needs to stand up and answer. The truth is that it has become less transparent and less forthcoming precisely at a time in the pandemic when the public needs answers more than ever.
It was not always this way. We remember the beginning of the pandemic, when Canadians received in-depth explanations of every measure and the evidence justifying it. The result was high public trust, high compliance with restrictions and guidelines, and a sense that we were all pulling in the same direction.
The situation at the airports is frustrating. People who are having their travel plans cancelled are under extreme stress. The government should have seen this coming and it should have fixed it. We need more answers and more transparency from the Liberal government.
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- May/19/22 12:28:47 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for South Surrey—White Rock.
It is an honour for me to rise in my place today to speak about a pressing issue facing Canadians and international travellers entering and exiting through Canada's various ports of entry, including airports, land border crossings, bridge border crossings and even CBSA marine reporting sites for small vessels.
My hon. colleague from Thornhill has brought forward an excellent and timely motion today, one which I will be fully supporting. Ultimately, it calls on the government “to immediately revert to pre-pandemic rules and service levels for travel.” In short, the Liberal government's outdated COVID-19 protocols at airports and other international ports of entry are causing extreme delays, lineups, bottlenecks and missed connections. Worst of all, they are acting as a disincentive for those wishing to travel to Canada.
While the focus of our opposition motion today is on airports, it is very important and relevant that other international ports of entry are mentioned and included as well, because they are all connected in our economic ecosystem. These ports of entry support businesses and economic opportunities in many sectors, including tourism, which is very important in my riding, as we have the city of Niagara Falls and the towns of Niagara-on-the-Lake and Fort Erie.
My Niagara Falls riding has four international bridge crossings. They are managed by the Niagara Falls Bridge Commission and the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority, respectively. These are the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge, the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge, the Rainbow Bridge and the Peace Bridge. All have been hit hard by the two-year pandemic, and the federal government has done nothing to support these bridges, despite the heavy hardship of lost traffic due to extended border closures.
One of the biggest issues I hear about at our international bridge crossings is that of backlogs and delays being caused by the ArriveCAN app. In an email from March 24, 2022, the general manager of the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority warned local politicians that their analysis showed the continued mandatory use of the ArriveCAN app would result in much longer processing times and lengthy border waits, which would significantly depress cross-border traffic at a time when we were moving into the 2022 summer tourism summer season.
Fast forward two months, and here we are. His prediction was right. I raised this issue with the federal government as soon as I could. What did it do to prepare for these border backlogs? It doubled down and decided to spend $25 million more in budget 2022 to continue to support the mandatory use of this application.
Along my border community riding, there are also a number of CBSA marine reporting sites for small vessels. They include the Niagara-on-the-Lake Sailing Club, the Smugglers Cove Boat Club, the Greater Niagara Boating Club, Miller's Creek Marina, Bertie Boating Club, and the Buffalo Canoe Club, amongst others. Out of all these sites I just listed, only one is operational. Miller's Creek in the upper Niagara River and Fort Erie is open, but all the other sites are closed.
Members can imagine, if someone is boating on the lower Niagara River in Niagara-on-the-Lake, they would have to travel all the way to Port Weller in St. Catharines to report in with CBSA. If they are on the upper Niagara River but closer to Chippawa and Niagara Falls, then they have to travel all the way to Fort Erie and all the way back just to report in with CBSA. This adds many kilometres to a voyage and is a huge waste of time and money for boaters, especially as fuel prices skyrocket to record highs.
These closures are a huge issue for local recreational boaters, especially as we approach the May long weekend and enter the summer boating season. We need the government to reopen all sites immediately. There is no time to waste.
Tourist businesses in my riding were hit first. They were hit the hardest, and they will take the longest to recover from COVID-19. The effect these failing Liberal policies are having on our boaters will only make recovery take that much longer. Tourist businesses in Niagara Falls, Niagara-on-the-Lake and Fort Erie depend on domestic and international visitors travelling to our communities, spending their time and dollars and enjoying all that Niagara has to offer. The operation of attractions, historic sites, restaurants, wineries, craft breweries, cideries, casinos and many other businesses depend on this visitation.
In communities such as Niagara, international visitation is important. While they make up approximately 25% of our total visitor base, these international visitors account for over 50% of the dollars spent in our tourism communities. This spend helps support over 40,000 jobs that are reliant on a strong tourism industry, which we had in Niagara before this pandemic. That is why it is essential we welcome back our international friends, guests and visitors. That starts by giving them a great, quick and efficient experience at our international ports of entry.
No one is going to choose Canada as a travel vacation destination if they have to risk waiting hours upon hours in stressful and frustrating lineups at an airport or a border crossing. Economic damage and missed opportunities are already being incurred. As the world reopens from COVID and other countries lift their restrictions, Canada looks to be stuck in the past and out of touch with reality. For example, the European Union and the United States have dropped their mask mandates for passengers on flights and in airports.
As countries around the world are reducing red tape and making it easier for citizens to travel again, the Liberals in Ottawa continue to impose their outdated and unjustified mandates, which are leading to longer lines and a slower recovery. As an example, fully vaccinated travellers arriving in Canada are still subjected to random COVID-19 testing, and in some cases, these travellers are not even told they have been selected until they get a surprise automated phone call or email a few days later from Switch Health.
This happened to Kathryn and her daughter, two constituents of mine. On May 10, they had an uneventful Nexus border crossing at the Blue Water Bridge in Sarnia. They were never informed that they were selected for random testing, nor were they given a random test on their exit from their Nexus inspection. Three days later, they received multiple phone calls and emails from Switch Health warning them to get a day-one random test or else risk contravening a public health order with severe penalties, including fines upwards of tens of thousands of dollars and mandatory quarantine. It seems illogical for people to be told they have to take a random test and then wait for Switch Health to send it to them by courier so they can complete it a few days, if not weeks, later. How is this in the best public health interest of Canadians? Simply put, the incompetence of the government knows no bounds.
Many experts have called for the end of these ridiculous requirements. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce has called for a step back to improve regulations in order for Canada to become more competitive. The president of the Canadian Airports Council has called for the removal of legacy public health protocols, noting that mandatory testing is leading to bottlenecks and hurting Canada's competitiveness. These requirements are stifling our hard-hit tourism industry and are leading to long delays for Canadians just looking to travel after a long two years of obeying government-induced lockdown measures.
All of these terrible travel experiences at our airports and border crossings are hurting Canada's economy, competitiveness and international global reputation as a top tourist destination. Since the world started reopening months ago, Canada has lagged far behind our international tourism destination competitors due to these bad federal government policies. On a scale this large, every port of entry across our country is negatively impacted, and this ripple effect negatively impacts every riding of the House of Commons, especially those, like Niagara Falls, that depend on tourism as a major economic driver. We all benefit from a strong tourism industry, and we all lose when it is weak and chaotic, like it is now.
After two long years of government shutdowns, lockdowns, border closures and stringent travel restrictions, many tourist businesses in my riding are counting on a significant rebound this summer. Unfortunately, due to these travel measures and issues at airports and borders, government policy is working to stifle, rather than support, an urgently needed recovery in our tourism economy in 2022. Through their lack of preparedness to keep Canadians safe and preserve our economic best interests, the Liberals and NDP are abdicating their responsibility to govern.
In my opinion, before COVID, Canada was the best place to visit and vacation. We can get back to being the best, and we should strive for nothing less, but we have a lot of work ahead of us, and it starts with objective of this motion, which is to get the federal government to immediately revert to prepandemic rules and service levels for travel. Niagara badly needs to achieve economic recovery this summer, and that is simply not going to happen if ArriveCAN and other federal travel and health restrictions continue at our airports and borders. It seems as though everyone wants to achieve economic recovery from this pandemic and a return to normalcy, everyone except the Liberal-NDP government, but it should know there is still time to save the 2022 tourism season if it acts quickly, and it should start by supporting today's common sense and timely motion.
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- May/19/22 1:26:24 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, since our colleague from Winnipeg North could not answer my question, I will try again and ask my other colleague.
The Liberal government implemented a new, extremely bureaucratic measure: ArriveCAN. Travellers must download the application, enter data before they leave, and enter new data when they arrive.
Can she tell me what this measure, which I find useless, actually does? What is its purpose?
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- May/19/22 2:21:23 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberals' ideological stubbornness, which is not supported by science or any recognized scientific opinion, is hurting Canadians.
What is happening in Canada's airports clearly shows that this NDP-Liberal government is out of its depth, and travellers are the ones paying the price. They are the ones who have to wait in huge lineups and who are being held captive on planes for hours.
This chaos was foreseeable, but once again the Liberals did not see it coming and did not do anything. Oh yes, they are doing one thing. They are blaming travellers. When will the Prime Minister lift the public health restrictions in airports?
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- May/19/22 2:23:36 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is another day, and there are more horror stories from Canada's airports. While the Minister of Transport blamed out-of-practice travellers for the bottlenecks at those airports, the parliamentary secretary now says that it is a global phenomenon. It is not.
The government has not acknowledged any responsibility. It still has not shared any specific advice it claims to have for the restrictions in the airports.
When will the government apologize to all of the travellers who have missed their flights due to its incompetence?
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- May/19/22 2:24:54 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the airports across the country are still grinding to a halt, and the government says that it is people's fault. There are people who are waiting months and months for passports, while the government tells them they have to line up at 4 a.m. For basic government services, the government says it is sorry and to take a number. The parliamentary secretary has said testing 4,000 travellers a day and keeping four million Canadians from domestic travel is based on public health advice.
What specific advice has she seen that nobody in this House has?
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