Parliament was told on Tuesday the government’s controversial ArriveCan app, which was designed to speed up border crossings, actually increased the amount of time travelers spent entering Canada.
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, officials with the Customs and Immigration Union told the House of Commons trade committee that things got so bad for some travellers that they defecated themselves while waiting to cross the border.
“I am hearing from one of our officers at Niagara Falls that he’s had travelers who come through who had actually urinated and defecated themselves having been stuck in the car for so long, to give you an idea of how terrible and drastic the situation at our borders was and how terribly short-staffed we are,” explained national president Mark Weber.
“The greatest difficulty we had was people simply didn’t know they had to complete the app or we had cases where some people just refused to fill it out,” Weber said.
“We had to deal with a good 30 to 40 percent of travelers arriving without it completed which caused the four or five-hour lineups that we saw.”
Earlier this week, the Liberals announced they would be making ArriveCan optional for travellers entering Canada and were scrapping remaining border vaccine mandates.
Records show that over a million travellers passed through the Canadian border without ever using the application and less than 200 were fined for disobeying public health rules.
House of Commons documents indicate that between Jan. 1 and Aug. 31, a whopping 1,651,900 travellers arrived at the border for entry into Canada without having submitted their public health information through ArriveCAN prior to arrival.”
ArriveCan also caused issues for Hurricane Fiona rescue efforts in Nova Scotia. According to Nova Scotia Power, a US crew assigned to provide aid had an “issue related to ArriveCan” when entering Canada.
“I do know that there was a situation where some crew from Maine were having an issue at the border, ” Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston said.
