Canada's Border Gaps

(Toronto Star)

Since 9/11 Canada has poured a lot of resources into hardening our borders against unwelcome visitors, crime, contraband and terror.

Currently the Canada Border Services Agency spends $1.5 billion and has a staff of nearly 13,000 to process the 96 million travellers who enter this country every year and cargo valued at $400 billion.

But as Auditor-General Sheila Fraser reported last week, the border remains too porous for comfort. While alert officials red-flagged at least 192,000 air travellers and hundreds of containers last year as potentially “high risk,” based on intelligence and other information, far too many travellers, and too much cargo, got into the country without the second, stern check that those red flags warranted.

How big a problem this poses is anyone’s guess. But the mere fact that we are left guessing is not reassuring.

Looking at red-flag cases earlier this year, the “National Risk Assessment Centre found that an average of 13 per cent of its customs lookouts and 21 per cent of its immigration lookouts from January to March of 2007 were not referred for further examination,” Fraser noted in her annual report. That cannot be good.

Fraser also faulted the border agency for not carrying out more random “spot” inspections to deter wrongdoers.

Despite these concerns, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day claims, “we’ve seen great improvement” in the past year. Maybe so, but however improved, Canada’s tracking system falls short of the mark. Numbers like these will be bandied about by Canada-bashers in the United States who still think, wrongly, that the 9/11 terrorists slipped into the U.S. from here across an overly porous border, and who want it walled off. More to the point, Canadians deserve more assurance that our border controls are keeping this country as safe as possible.

In Fraser’s carefully measured judgment, Canada's border agency is “still in the early stages of developing an integrated risk management framework.” It has not shifted available resources into high-risk areas. At the same time, the agency has made “little progress” monitoring to see what works and what doesn’t.

Six years after 9/11, this is not good enough. It is not even close, for a Conservative government that insists it is making public safety a top priority. Day and his department have much work to do.