Honourable senators, I’m pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-21, An Act to amend the Customs Act, at third reading. Bill C-21 implements phase four of the Beyond the Border Action Plan, as established by both Canada and the United States in December 2011.

Bill C-21 amends the Customs Act to allow the CBSA to receive basic information on people exiting Canada, either crossing a land border with the United States, or flying internationally through a Canadian airport. The type of information collected can be found on page 2 of a person’s passport. That will be collected along with the time and place of departure.

Each day over 300,000 people cross the Canada-U.S. land border, and over 204,000 passengers fly out of Canadian airports to a variety of destinations around the world. The need to ensure an efficient border crossing for Canadians while maintaining the overall safety of Canadians is of vital importance and is at the heart of this piece of legislation.

For people leaving by land or by air, no additional steps or delays will be felt. At the land border, travellers would hand their passport to the U.S. border officer, as is the current practice. The information would be collected, again as per current practice. With the passage of Bill C-21, that data would be sent to the Canada Border Services Agency within a matter of minutes.

For those leaving by air, it would be the air carriers who would collect the basic data from passenger manifests and provide that to the CBSA before the departure of the flights.

I would like to thank Senators Gold, Housakos, and Dalphond, and members of National Security and Defence Committee for your work on this bill. As you have heard throughout the debate of this piece of legislation, Bill C-21 would help combat cross-border crime, address national security threats in a more efficient manner, increase the preventative measures in place regarding the export of controlled goods and further ensure the integrity of our government programs and immigration system.

Bill C-21 allows for a number of significant improvements to systems which are currently in place. This includes when an AMBER Alert is issued. Once the alert is delivered, the CBSA would be able to create a lookout for that child with all of the necessary information, including the suspected abductor and the affected child.

If an abductor is attempting to leave by air, we would be able to intercept that individual before the flight even takes off. If the abductor has already crossed a land border, we would know when the person left and from what border location in order to notify the RCMP and allow them to take the necessary steps to coordinate with their counterparts to find that child.

In cases of child abduction, time is the most critical factor. Bill C-21 will enhance our existing system in order to bring the children home or possibly to even prevent them from ever leaving the country.

To that end, the National Security and Defence Committee recommended that the government take active steps to ensure this process can be done in an effective manner. Moreover, they recommended the Government of Canada explore and adopt further measures to prevent child abductions by including information on child custody restrictions in the current CBSA database, as well as all issued AMBER Alerts in order to further ensure the safety of all Canadian children.

Time is also a critical factor in dealing with high-risk travellers. At the moment, people on what we call the no-fly list may be monitored as suspects by security personnel and can be denied boarding on flights as a means of preventing them from leaving the country to potentially join a terrorist organization abroad.

However, individuals who have not been added to the list, but who are currently being monitored by the RCMP or CSIS or others, may be able to leave the country. In these instances, the authorities have no way of gathering the necessary information at the moment on where they have gone and for how long. The passage of Bill C-21 would allow the CBSA to provide an advance warning to CSIS or the RCMP regarding those individuals and their whereabouts. If required, action could be taken to prevent them from leaving the country. If that action is not necessary, a record of their departure would be provided to the appropriate authorities to help in their ongoing investigations.

Bill C-21 also aids in combatting human trafficking. According to a 2017 report by the International Labour Organization and Walk Free Foundation, an estimated 24.9 million victims are currently trapped in modern-day slavery situations around the world. We may think that this serious 21st-century problem has little or nothing to do with Canada. However, between 2009 and 2016, there were a total of 1,220 police-reported incidents of human trafficking here in Canada. In fact, a young Cape Breton woman who had been a victim of human trafficking visited me in my office last week. Human trafficking can lead to enslavement, sexual assault and other forms of abuse, and it disproportionately affects women and children.

Bill C-21 will allow Canadian agencies to better track high-risk travellers and to follow their movements in order to detect the travel patterns that these types of crimes usually lead to in order to apprehend human traffickers more quickly and efficiently.

Bill C-21 also makes the immigration process more efficient and easier to manoeuvre for Canadian citizenship applicants by having in place a reliable system for collecting exit information to add to the entry information already gathered on those applying for citizenship.

With this bill in place, applicants will no longer have to prove that they have spent at least 1,095 days in Canada over the space of the past five years. This information will automatically be provided to immigration officials. During the Senate committee meeting, the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada officials noted this would help address current delays in the system by speeding up processing times, and that’s a good thing.

Likewise, certain federal programs have residency requirements. Thus, by gathering the exit data to complement the entry data we already collect, we are eliminating the possibility of abuses to these programs.

We have heard a number of times about the effects this bill may have on the snowbirds, but rest assured, colleagues, individuals who are already collecting old age benefits legally, such as Old Age Security, or OAS, would not be affected by Bill C-21.

Once an individual has been a resident of Canada for 20 years following the age of 18, OAS becomes fully portable regardless of where the person chooses to reside. Medicare eligibility would, similarly, not be affected since exit information would not be shared with the provinces.

Moreover, a significant component of Bill C-21 is the measures introduced to strengthen the CBSA’s ability to manage the illegal movement of goods out of Canada. At the moment, the Customs Act only addresses goods being imported into the country, but as noted in the Auditor General’s 2015 report, improvements are necessary regarding the export of goods across the Canada-U.S. border.

Approximately 140,000 cars and 28,000 trucks cross our border daily. In September 2018 alone, over 4.5 million individuals left Canada either by car, plane or another mode of transportation.

At present, a CBSA officer can only question a person leaving Canada on reasonable grounds or with respect to the transport of currency from Canada over $10,000. As such, the new section 94 of the Customs Act introduced in Bill C-21 will allow CBSA officers to question travellers leaving Canada on other reasonable grounds of suspicion. This would enhance the CBSA’s ability to prevent the export of prohibited, controlled or regulated goods leaving Canada.

The National Security and Defence Committee has held four meetings and met with 15 witnesses in their study of Bill C-21. A number of very important topics were explored within these meetings, including the strict limits to be put in place on the use and disclosure of the information gathered and the substance of the memoranda of understanding and privacy principles that will be drafted in order to enable the sharing of information between government bodies.

The topic of oversight for CBSA officials came up at the first meeting of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. The committee was told by the Honourable Ralph Goodale, Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, that we should:

. . . expect to see in the weeks and months ahead further new legislation dealing with the proper oversight of CBSA.

On November 21, the committee heard from Daniel Therrien, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada regarding the general intent of this bill and to the amendment to the bill, which was passed by the House of Commons. This is related to the data retention period. On the bill itself, Mr. Therrien noted that:

I am generally satisfied that this border management initiative is based on important public policy objectives and the personal information in question is not particularly sensitive.

For the amendment, Mr. Therrien indicated that, in order to achieve greater legal certainty, section 93.1 should be amended in order to clarify that the data collected under sections 92 and 93 shall be retained by the agency for a period of not more than 15 years, so to a maximum of 15 years. He said:

It would be desirable . . . to achieve greater legal certainty to amend section 93.1 to clarify that it applies only to CBSA and that it is a maximum period.

That is, the 15-year maximum period. I have personally verified with Mr. Therrien regarding the wording of the amendment agreed to by the committee and he agrees it captures his concern regarding the retention period for the CBSA.

Bill C-21 gained broad consensus from all parties in the House of Commons and we have heard a similar level of agreement in this chamber.

This bill will ensure that the CBSA will be able to continue to protect our borders with this new access to information on people leaving Canada, and enable law enforcement agencies to better react to time-sensitive situations, including cases of missing children and victims of human trafficking. It will also improve the CBSA’s ability to prevent the export of prohibited, controlled or regulated goods leaving Canada.

Bill C-21 will allow Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to process applicants with more efficiency and help to ensure that eligibility requirements for government programs are being met.

Honourable senators, the time has come to close the information gap that exists in our current border operations. Bill C-21 is but one aspect of a larger national security strategy, but it is an essential one and I hope I have your support as we bring it to a vote.

Thank you, welalioq.