(Washington) American elected officials and business representatives are increasing pressure on the Trudeau government to reduce travel delays between the United States and Canada.
Posted at 12:58 pm
Updated at 5:29 pm.
Nearly 1,500 emails have been sent to MPs and Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino since the Canadian American Business Council (CABC) launched its new campaign “Travel Like It 2019” two weeks ago.
She is calling on Ottawa to scrap the controversial ArriveCan app, a mandatory screening tool for people arriving in Canada.
The CABC is asking the federal government to eliminate the backlog of 350,000 applications to join the NEXUS program so that it can expedite the passage of travelers across the Canada-US border.
Both are direct symptoms of the pandemic and are among a series of criticisms of government actions that are causing widespread travel delays across the continent and deterring some travelers.
But those are also easy factors to eliminate, according to the organization’s president and CEO Mary Scott Greenwood, who fears the pandemic has become an easy excuse to gradually increase access to the border.
Last week, federal Transport Minister Omar Algabra told the House of Commons Transport Committee that long-term travel delays at Canadian airports were to blame for the long-term effects of the pandemic.
However, the conservative opposition, like some US lawmakers, tried to turn Arrivcon into a political lightning rod.
“This requirement discourages travel, impedes the flow of commerce and burdens travelers with submitting private health information,” Rep. Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, wrote in a letter last week to Minister Mendicino and Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s ambassador to the United States. .
Persons entering Canadian soil must use an application available on the web and smartphone to upload their travel documents and their vaccination status in advance.
Some travelers dread app requests, while others don’t go through the download process until they reach the border or airport, causing delays at customs, Ms.me Stefanik.
“As a result, passengers are choosing to stay at home rather than face the long wait times and frustrations caused by the ArriveCan app. »
On NEXUS, New York Democratic Representative Brian Higgins wrote to US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Chris Magnus, demanding that the agency prioritize reducing the backlog of requests from the American side.
The system receives between 8,000 and 15,000 requests a day, and the current wait time for an appointment is more than nine months, Higgins wrote.
He also cited recent border statistics indicating that the volume of inbound traffic to the United States is still a shadow of what it was in 2019.
According to data released last week by the border agency, 250,678 passenger vehicles entered the United States through the Buffalo-Niagara Falls area in June this year, up from 462,665 in June 2019.
“These reduced operations are hurting the United States economy as well as the quality of life along our northern border,” Higgins said.
“Faster processing of NEXUS applications and interviews will increase border operations as we work to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. »
The current backlog of applications for NEXUS has reached 350,000. While NEXUS offices in the United States reopened in April, all 13 enrollment centers in Canada were closed.
The media recently reported that these offices were closed because of a dispute over whether US Customs officials should allow handguns to be carried into NEXUS centers, but Mary Scott Greenwood is not convinced.
A bilateral agreement between Canada and the United States governing preclearance already allows US border guards to keep their handguns under certain circumstances, she said. The United States wants to extend these provisions to include NEXUS.
Mme Greenwood said she believes the federal government could open these centers sooner if they prioritized them — and she 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 argued.
“I think it’s getting to the point where it needs to be addressed. »
