Canada is arming it border guards; the U.S. is upping the user fees for Canadian air traveller and cargo shippers. Once we were such happy neighbours … 🙂 I reported yesterday for CTV on the border guard story. Some notes that didn’t make it into that file:
- The Conservatives say it will take ten years to train, arm, and deploy 4,400 border guards but yesterday officials could not say how many points-of-entry will get an armed guard. Canada has 1,200 points-of-entry, including 119 land crossings with the U.S., but officials with the Canada Border Services Agency and Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day’s office did not know if the plan was to put an armed guard at each one of those 1,200 points-of-entry.
- The Conservatives announced a plan that will take ten years to fulfill but only announced funding for two years. In the run-up to last year’s election, the Conservatives often criticized the Liberals for the ten-year horizon on the Liberal daycare plan.
- In June of this year, Alain Jolicoeur, the head of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), told a Senate Committee that of the 119 land crossings with the U.S., 21 were not wired into any data network or the Internet. So, if a bad guy named David Akin showed up at one of these posts, the guard there could not run the name “David Akin” through a central database to see if I ought to be detained. Senators, at the time, were more than a little unhappy about this state of affairs. Yesterday, a CBSA official said that all 21 had now been wired up.
- The vast majority of land border crossings are single-officer posts. The CBSA said that of the 119 land border crossings, 95 are normally staffed by just one person. Including those 95 land crossings, there are a total of 138 single-officer posts. That’s an improvement over 2005 when there were 139 single-officer posts. Some crossings, as several news outlets have reported over the last year, consist of a videophone terminal where visitors are asked to phone in and identify themselves.
- Some other stats provided to in the backgrounder issued by the Prime Minister’s Office: 260,000 travellers are processed into Canada every day. In 2004, there were 621 weapons seizures, 8,711 drug seizures valued at $290–million, and currency seizures of more than $12–million that were believed to be the proceeds of crime.