Canada Customs strike causes chaos at Ont border crossings

WINDSOR, Ont. – Trucks attempting to enter Canada from the US were held up for hours at several Southern Ontario border crossings this afternoon as front line Customs Border Services Agency officers walked off the job.

Canada-bound commercial traffic leading up to the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, the Ambassador Bridge, and the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron-Sarnia slowed to a crawl and trucks in Detroit could be seen lined up as far south as the Rouge River bridge.

There’s no word as of yet when operations are expected to return to normal. At 10:00 pm on Thursday night, passenger vehicles at the Ambassador were backed up for about 15 minutes, while trucks were still delayed for over an hour, according to the real-time traffic report at the bridge’s website.

Canada Customs officers want more than
just contraband scanners in their holster

“It’s a disaster getting back into Canada today,” says David Bradley, CEO of the Canadian Trucking Alliance. “It’s costing our industry a million dollars an hour — a cost that ultimately must be borne by the economy. We can’t afford to absorb these delay costs. We need a resolution.”

Apparently, customs officers launched the strike because of the federal government’s slow decision to allow them to carry firearms. Their union has argued for years officers should be armed like their US counterparts.

Ron Moran, national president of the Customs Excise Union who’s representing 5,000 front-line CBSA workers and intelligence officers, says his members fear for their safety. “Our members exercised this right in part because they don’t trust the armed and dangerous lookout system, which is critically flawed in that it repeatedly fails to identify armed and dangerous felons as such,” he said in a press release.

Last week, Moran testified before the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence and accused CBSA management of ignoring objections from front-line customs officers in introducing a “widespread practice of admitting individuals into Canada even after they are caught trying to smuggle guns or drugs.”

While Moran says feedback from Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Anne McLellan was positive, he recommended an immediate armed presence at border crossings and urged the government to re-open RCMP detachments.

“Our members understandably expect not to be left exposed, in the interim, to the lethal risk now finally acknowledged by the Government. In short, they want to be equipped properly and protected immediately,” he said at the time.

In his submission, Moran also accused CBSA of playing a “numbers game” by setting quotas that result in unnecessary vehicle searches. “CBSA uses a border management plan to set artificial numerical targets for vehicle and vessel searches, without regard to the goal of finding contraband or any result beyond the search itself.”

The Ontario Trucking Association says it has feared recurrent mini-protests at the Peace Bridge in Fort Erie, Ont. and Buffalo over the last year would eventually spill over to the major Michigan-Ontario border crossings.

Each time the union workers walked off the job in those cases, Human Resource and Skills Development Canada ruled that there was no threat to personal safety and forced the customs inspectors back to work, OTA reports.

“These walk offs are causing serious delays crossing the Canada-US border for both commercial vehicles and private cars undermining all of our collective efforts to assure US business and visitors that the border does not constitute a barrier to trade,” Bradley wrote in a letter to Anne McLellan at the time. “Much of what has been accomplished since Sept. 11 to keep the border functioning will be undone if we allow these types of situations to continue. Your officials must take immediate action to put in place whatever plans are required to end the current job action and to prevent another such work stoppage at the border.”

In the meantime, Bradley is encouraging all trucking companies to charge their customers for delays their trucks are experiencing getting back into Canada. “Our customers need to become engaged in this issue. They have to understand that the delays are not the fault of the truckers and we cannot afford to have our equipment and drivers sitting in line-ups.”