When the House of Commons returns on Tuesday, it’s a pretty safe bet to say that the news that the Canada Border Services Agency is shifting customs agents from the GTA to the Quebec border is going to be one of the main topics of conversation. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that it’ll come up in Question Period on the first day back. Why? Because amidst this news, a memo from Air Canada pilots claims that they may face delays of up to an hour, being kept on the tarmac because of this lack of agents. There are denials all around (and I’m a bit skeptical myself – I can see big lines in the airport, but I have a hard time seeing why they’d detain them on the tarmac), but the line is going to be that Trudeau is making you wait on the tarmac because he can’t enforce the law on the border.

It’s not exactly true, of course. Whether we see actual delays at airports remains to be seen, but the continued insistence that he can somehow snap his fingers and the border will somehow seal itself is this specious bit of political fiction that nobody wants to seem to own up to. I’ve written about this before – he can’t unilaterally declare the entire border to be an official port of entry, nor can he amend the Safe Third Country Agreement because that requires the buy-in of the Americans, and that’s not going to happen. If he suspends the agreement, like the NDP demands, that will cause a flood at border crossings of people who are jurisdiction shopping while making asylum claims, which was the whole reason the agreement was made in the first place. Direct engagement with the communities where the influx is coming from had success with the Haitian community and the government is looking to repeat it with Nigeria, where most of the new claimants are coming from (and no one has yet explained why that’s the case), but we’ll see when they can actually start engaging.

What this does illustrate is that the government still has a way to go in order to re-capitalize CBSA and ensure that they have enough border guards and customs agents. (They also need to fill vacancies in the Immigration and Refugee Board, and to give them additional resources, but that hasn’t been happening expeditiously either). And yes, this is something that Conservatives can share in the blame with as well, because they cut CBSA to the point where they were having to suspend a number of programmes like screening for drugs being exported, and they had to let go of most of their sniffer dogs because they no longer had the budget. Will this light a fire under the government to properly rebuild their capacity? We’ll see. They insist they’re re-investing but it may be of little use if the situation sounds as dire as it is right now with these rotations in and out of the border crossing.

Good reads:

• After Justin Trudeau made hopeful noises that they were close to a NAFTA deal, the US Trade Representative poured cold water all over that. There goes that deadline.
• Canadian Forces personnel have been deployed to help with the flooding in BC.
• Six months after the government opened the door to weapons exports to Ukraine, they won’t say if they’ve issued any export permits or not.
• The government has green-lit Seaspan yard’s to start building parts of the upcoming Joint Support Ships between other contract, but delays are getting worse.
• Some Sixties Scoop survivors are unhappy with the settlement agreement, and are accusing the supervising judge of bias.
• The Ethics Commissioner says he’ll formally look into whether Liberal MP Raj Grewal breached the Code regarding an invitation on the India trip.
• Catherine McKenna held a women-led summit on climate change, and the topic turned to the added vitriol that women face when talking about climate.
• National Defence is looking to hire hackers to help advise them on cyber-warfare and to prevent hacking of vehicles (and presumably drones).
• The BC Civil Liberties Association is joining the lawsuit against the government’s Canada Summer Jobs Grant attestation.
• An SNC-Lavalin executive has been charged regarding a political donation scheme.
• The National Postdigs into the fracturing of the federal and provincial wings of the NDP over the Trans Mountain pipeline issue.
• The Canadian Press’ Baloney Meter™ looks at the issue around voter information cards being used to commit election fraud.
• Aaron Wherry offers a reminder that yes, previous governments did help out the oilpatch in a number of ways, so perhaps Scheer should check himself.
• Susan Delacourt digs into what “time for a change” can mean in electoral politics, and how parties try to work with the narrative.

Odds and ends:

Patrick Brown is going to write a book about his ouster, which he deems the “worst political assignation since Julius Caesar.” Oh, Muffin…

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