Don Urquhart, Times-Chronicle
Frustrations with the seemingly unending capricious, and downright mystifying border requirements have been the bane of cross border-hoppers since the door creaked open a crack in early November for leisure travel.
But take heart in the fact that those who work on the front lines for the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) are just as tired and frustrated at all the flip-flopping, pandemic-induced bureaucracy as you are.
Speaking at a recent Rotary Club of Osoyoos lunch, Michael Cacchioni, Superintendent, Okanagan & Kootenay District for the CBSA highlighted the challenges he and his colleagues have faced on a daily basis, over the past two years, pretty much all of which revolve around COVID-19.
“We would get information from our headquarters in Ottawa saying this is what’s happening and they would change sometimes on a daily basis.”
He cites as an example one particular day when the information came out first thing in the morning, changing to something else at 10 a.m. only to change a third time by 10:30 a.m. As if that wasn’t enough, by noon the rules had basically reverted back to what they originally had been.
“So we certainly have issues with regard to that, it’s been challenging keeping up with everything that’s changing in all the regulations and applying them consistently.” Consistently applying these ever-changing rules and regulations is actually the biggest issue, he says.
Of course, the hot question on everyone’s lips is what are the requirements ‘today’ for crossing the border and more importantly, coming home?
Cacchioni says the only requirement going south is to be fully vaccinated. “They may ask you for proof for that, but in my experience, they haven’t been asking,” he says.
Coming back to Canada is of course a completely different kettle of fish. As it stands right now, he says, you need to be double vaccinated. And you still need to have your pre-arrival test and that can either be a molecular PCR test or a rapid antigen test administered by qualified medical personnel like a pharmacist or doctor.
And last but not least all this information must be entered into the ArriveCAN app either on a smartphone or desktop computer (which requires printing out the information). And one last thing: random testing still applies.
Aside from these pandemic challenges, there are a whole host of other more mundane ones. “Doing more with less,” recruitment challenges and difficulty retaining staff are significant problems for the organization, Cacchioni says.
Getting people to move to small communities is problematic too. Osoyoos is not bad, he says, but places like Midway, Grand Forks, and Christina Lake are more of a challenge and then there are places like the Yukon and other remote locations where it is exceedingly difficult to staff.
Keeping up with technology is a constant problem too. With a notoriously slow bureaucracy, government departments often find themselves far behind the technology curve. A really good example, Cacchioni says, “is the computer systems we work on – we were running on Windows 7 until just last year,” he told the incredulous audience.
And being hampered in areas like technology and even staffing means other challenges become even bigger, such as dealing with the “constantly evolving threats such as organized crime groups. They always have more money, time and resources than us to be able to go after them,” he says.
When asked by the Times-Chronicle what the key criminality issues are, Cacchioni says little has changed in this area. “Our area here is very popular with motorcycle gangs, and other organized crime gangs as well,” he says.
“We’ve seen a resurgence if you will, Kelowna has its own Hells Angels chapter now, those types of groups tend to flock to the Okanagan simply because they like to play here and by doing so we also see those types of people coming back and forth across the border as well.”
The overall trend is still drug and weapon smuggling back and forth, he says. And that is where one positive aspect can be derived from COVID-19 – much, but not all of this criminal activity declined during the past two years.
