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WASHINGTON –
Lawmakers and cross-border business advocates in the United States want Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government to go back to the future to ease travel delays between the U.S. and Canada.
Nearly 1,500 emails have been sent to federal MPs and Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino since the Canada-American Business Council’s new campaign, “Travel Like It’s 2019,” launched two weeks ago.
The online campaign is calling on Ottawa to scrap the troublesome ArriveCan application, a mandatory pre-screening tool for visitors to Canada, and address the backlog plaguing the Canada-US Trusted Traveler system known as Nexus.
Both are direct symptoms of the COVID-19 pandemic and are just part of a constellation of factors that critics say are causing widespread travel delays across the continent and discouraging some would-be travelers.
But they’re also the easiest factors to eliminate, said the council’s chief executive officer Merriscott Greenwood, who fears the pandemic has become an easy excuse for the gradual thickening of the Canada-U.S. border.
“The public health emergency has given governments permission to have an asynchronous approach to what should be a synchronous border policy,” Greenwood said in an interview.
“It’s a big change. It’s really different. And we have to fix it.”
Just last week, Transport Minister Omar Algabra told the House of Commons transportation committee that the lingering effects of the pandemic are to blame for chronic travel delays at Canadian airports.
But the opposition Conservatives are trying to make a political lightning rod out of ArriveCan, the smartphone app and web portal that visitors must use to upload their travel documents and vaccination status ahead of time.
So have some American lawmakers.
“This requirement discourages travel, harms the flow of commerce and burdens travelers with providing personal health information,” Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York wrote in a letter last week to Mendicino and Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s ambassador to the US
Some travelers are intimidated by the app requirement, while others fail to follow the boarding procedure until they arrive at the border or airport, causing customs delays, Stefanik continued.
“As a result, travelers are choosing to stay home rather than face the long wait times and frustrations caused by the ArriveCan app.”
In Nexus, New York Democratic Rep. Brian Higgins wrote to Chris Magnus, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, to demand that the agency prioritize clearing the backlog of U.S. applications.
The system receives between 8,000 and 15,000 applications a day, Higgins wrote, and the current wait time for an appointment is more than nine months.
He also cited recent border statistics suggesting that the volume of traffic entering the US is still a shadow of what it was in 2019.
Data released by the border agency last week showed 250,678 private passenger vehicles crossed into the U.S. in the Buffalo-Niagara Falls area in June this year, compared to 462,665 in June 2019.
“These reduced operations are harmful to the United States economy as well as the quality of life along our northern border,” Higgins wrote.
“Timely processing of Nexus applications and interviews will increase border activity as we work to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The current backlog of Nexus applications has reached 350,000. Nexus offices in the US reopened in April, while the 13 enrollment centers in Canada remain closed.
Recent media reports suggest that those offices are closed because of a dispute over whether US customs officials should be allowed to carry weapons into Nexus centers, but Greenwood is not convinced.
The bilateral treaty that governs Canada-U.S. advance authorization already allows U.S. border agents to keep their weapons under certain circumstances, she said. The US reportedly wants those terms extended to include Nexus.
Greenwood said he believes the federal government can get these centers open quickly if it makes it a priority — and hopes the campaign will help make that happen.
“They hear about it from us, they hear about it from members of Congress and they hear about it from their own constituents,” she said.
“I think it’s escalated to the point where we have to deal with it.”
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on August 22, 2022.
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