Border plan comes up short

A 2011 strategy to improve trade and border issues has little to show five years later

OTTAWA— A high-profile strategy to ease the flow of travellers and trade to the United States and boost border security has had little impact, a new report says.

The “Beyond the Border Action Plan” was unveiled in December, 2011 to much fanfare to boost trade and eliminate border bottlenecks that had worsened due to heightened security in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks.

But five years later, an audit of the initiatives launched by federal departments and agencies to implement the plan found little evidence that any of them had improved security or made life easier for travellers.

“We concluded that the selected departments and agencies achieved limited results towards the objectives . . . of enhancing security and accelerating the legitimate flow of travel and trade,” says a report prepared by the auditor general. While the departments and agencies met the commitment laid out by the plan, “they faced many challenges in carrying out the initiatives and lacked performance indicators to assess results,” said the report.

Border issues are back in the spotlight in the wake of the election of president-elect Donald Trump, who campaigned on a protectionist agenda that questioned the value of foreign trade and promised a crackdown on refugees and illegal immigrants. The audit report drives home the importance of those issues, noting that the Canada-U.S. border is critical to “our economy and way of life,” with almost $700 billion in trade each year and 150 million land crossings by travellers with millions more going by air and water.

On the security front, the audit report concluded that Ottawa delivered on 19 commitments but had no way of measuring results for 17 of those initiatives, leaving officials in the dark whether any progress had been made.