Auditor General: Border agency not catching illegal exports

Drug runners, car thieves and illicit arms dealers in Canada can sleep a little easier, it seems.

In a scathing report..., Auditor General Michael Ferguson found the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) has been failing to identify, let alone examine and seize, many illegal shipments leaving Canada for other parts of the world.

That means drugs and stolen cars have been slipping through, as well as goods that may pose a threat to Canadian and global security. The Citizen has previously reported on Canadian government concerns that material usable in Iran’s nuclear program has been not been stopped at the border.

A number of factors were to blame for Canada’s lax export-control measures, Ferguson reported, though they all go back to the fact the CBSA is more concerned with examining and seizing goods coming into the country than those that are leaving it. Only about one per cent of CBSA staff work on export control fulltime.

As a result, Ferguson found the border agency was unable to review all of the 787,500 export declarations submitted electronically to the government in 2014, let alone the 44,000 submitted by paper. The CBSA also didn’t replace staff during vacations, sick leave or reassignment to higher-priority import control duties...

There were also long-term gaps. “We found that the (CBSA) did not conduct any examinations at one large Canada Post centre for processing parcels exported from Canada,” Ferguson reported. “We were told that this was due to insufficient staff and a need to focus on examining items entering Canada.”

The CBSA does have a centralized unit for identifying potential shipments containing illegal arms or material that can be used for military purposes such as nuclear programs. It has another for flagging potential shipments of stolen cars.

But while those units were successful in stopping some illicit goods from leaving Canada, including hundreds of stolen cars and “several shipments that were cause for national security concern,” about 20 per cent of flagged shipments were never examined.

“We were told that about one-third of (the unexamined) targets were not examined because the (CBSA’s) local office received information about the targets too late – that is, after the shipments had already left or been loaded on planes and ships,” Ferguson reported.

“Other reasons for not examining targets included not enough staff to handle the workload, being unable to find shipments, and carriers letting the shipments leave before the (CBSA) could examine them.”

The CBSA also had a spotty record in terms of tracking and examining high-risk shipments identified by other departments, such as Foreign Affairs, which oversees Canadian sanctions against other countries such as Russia, Iran, Belarus and North Korea.

CBSA officers are also not allowed to open parcels at random, which, “together with limited resources, resulted in the Agency’s not setting export of illegal drugs as an examination priority.”

Ferguson’s report isn’t the first time red flags have been raised about Canada’s export controls. The U.S. has long taken issue with Canadian drugs flowing across the border, while the CBSA has previously worried that some material has left Canada for Iran that could be used in the Islamic republic’s nuclear program...

This has been excerpted from 2 February 2016 article by the Ottawa Citizen.

For more details, please refer to the Auditor General's report: Controlling Exports at the Border.