(Montreal) The federal border agency is not acting quickly enough to address staff shortages that have bogged down airport traffic and exacerbated passenger frustration, the border agents’ union said Monday.
Posted at 5:14 p.m.
“The persistent wait times at airports and border crossings across the country clearly show that the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) has no plans for the situation to return to normal soon,” said Monday. the Customs and Immigration Union (CIU) in a statement.
The federal government has struggled to adjust to the scenes of endless lines, flight delays and daily bustle at airports, a problem the aviation industry — and now unions — blames the shortage federal security and customs officers.
The agency’s “summer action plan”, which imposes mandatory overtime and suspends non-essential training, amounts to “ill-planned half-measures” with no long-term solutions, the union said.
He calls on the CBSA and Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino to increase the number of border agents and commit to a long-term plan to address travel delays due to the shortage of workforce.
CIU is calling for the hiring of between 1,000 and 3,000 additional officers as it concludes its first round of negotiations with the federal government on a new collective agreement. He further argues that problems with congested airports and border crossings are set to increase during peak travel season.
The CBSA said it is using more workers and students, and adding automated kiosks in the customs area at Toronto’s Pearson airport.
Earlier this month, Ottawa suspended random COVID-19 testing at airports — a process that had bogged down passenger flow — and added more public health staff to check that travelers have completed their ArriveCan application submissions upon landing.
Union president Mark Weber said in an interview that the kiosks are failing to offset the significant decline in the number of front-line airport attendants since 2016.
“Our volumes are increasing every year. Summer is a season, it’s not an emergency. We don’t understand why the situation we have now wasn’t entirely predictable and why it wasn’t resolved before we got to this kind of desperate situation,” he said during a briefing. interview.
Bottlenecks are increasing despite passenger volumes at land crossings and airport customs, which are about 75 percent of pre-pandemic levels, he added.
Ground checkpoints are not exempt from the delays that plague Canada’s largest airports, with “significant wait times” at busy checkpoints, Weber added.
“In our busiest ports, in places like Windsor, it’s not uncommon to see wait times of two or three hours for cars to get through. »