The ArriveCAN app likely cost Canada’s tourism industry billions of dollars in lost revenue, according to witness testimony at a parliamentary hearing.
“It’s been hugely impactful and devastating,” said Jim Diodati, mayor of Niagara Falls. He was one of the witnesses at an Oct. 4 hearing of the House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade.
Diodati said the Niagara region usually gets around 20 million visitors a year, and some 40,000 people depend on the industry. He said U.S. tourism into the region is half of pre-pandemic numbers.
“Typically 50 percent of the revenue that comes into Niagara Falls comes from U.S. visitations,” he said. “Americans typically stay longer and spend more. So the long-term effect of this requirement at the border has been devastating.”
He added the group hardest hit by ArriveCAN may have been seniors.
“I was inundated with calls from these people saying they felt they were being discriminated against,” Diodati said.
“They were proud to show their passports, happy to show their vaccination status and boosters, but offended that they were being forced to do something they couldn’t do. … They’re not as tech-savvy as younger kids, and a lot of them could not do the app because they didn’t have smartphones, they didn’t have computers.”
He added in many cases it meant that agents with the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) had to help people try to navigate the app.
“Then our CBSA border guards, instead of worrying about drugs and guns and criminals, become administrators, helping them to download the app,” he said.
Beth Potter, president of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada (TIAC), told the committee the impact of ArriveCAN on tourism was significant.
“The ArriveCAN app and the requirements of the ArriveCAN app had a massive effect, and we were seeing a drop of 50 percent and more [on the number] of Americans coming into the country,” Potter said.
‘Devastating Impact’
Several Conservative MPs also spoke about the frustration they saw.
“My office was absolutely inundated with phone calls,” said Chris Lewis, MP for the riding of Essex in southern Ontario. “From businesses, from folks trying to get across, from nurses, from doctors that literally had glitches, had to spend time in quarantine, for no reason other than the failed app itself.”
Another MP, Lianne Rood, said it was a major headache.
“My office was inundated for months and months on a daily basis with dozens of phone calls, emails, senior citizens coming into the office in tears and totally distraught because they weren’t able to cross the border,” said Rood, who represents Lambton-Kent-Middlesex in southern Ontario.
“They didn’t have a smartphone, they didn’t have a data plan on a phone.”
Vaccine Mandate
An infectious disease specialist told the hearing that medical data was showing the border measures had outlived their usefulness by the spring of this year—long before all the requirements were dropped on Oct. 1. It came during questioning by Conservative MP Tony Baldinelli, who represents Niagara Falls.“In your view,” asked Baldinelli, “approximately when was it no longer necessary or appropriate to use travel-related pandemic management tools, such as ArriveCAN, at the border?”
Dr. Zain Chagla, an associate professor at McMaster University, said: “It became pretty apparent in spring of 2022 that that was the case. Many of the restrictions domestically had been lifted, recognizing that many of the measures were not really making sense.”
Chagla also told the committee that he doesn’t see vaccine mandates at borders being useful for the foreseeable future.
‘Forces You to Lie’
Mayor Diodati said delays at land crossing in his region were four times longer than normal, despite greatly reduced tourism numbers. And there were other problems, he said.“The app forces you to lie,” said Diodati. “It wants to know your quarantine address, and day trippers that come to Niagara Falls don’t have an address because they’re going home the same day—so they have to lie, and some of them were putting in the Peace Bridge address. And you know, these are law-abiding citizens—people that don’t want to lie, but they had no choice.”
However, several witnesses at the hearing said they do see the app having a future to speed up handling passengers through airports.
Monette Pasher, president of the Canadian Airports Council, pointed out air traffic is expected to double by 2040, and she believes an app like ArriveCAN can play a role in handling the growing traffic. But she stressed it should be voluntary.
“So the people who want to increase their throughput at the gates can do that,” she said. “And the people who want to use paper and aren’t good with technology can do it the old way.”
Trevor Boudreau, manager of government relations at the Vancouver Airport Authority, also spoke in favour of the app’s usefulness in the future.
“The app and the platform it’s based on will be an important part of Canada’s future modernization of the future border—there’s no doubt about that,” Boudreau said.
TIAC’s Potter said part of the problem may have been making the app mandatory.
“By mandating people to use a tool they weren’t familiar with, a tool that took some time to fill out and caused a massive delay at border crossings, it really had a reputational damage on Canada’s brand. That is something that will take time for us to undo as an industry,” she said.
Both Potter and Diodati believe there is a need for some sort of campaign at the international level to let people know the strict COVID-19 border requirements are now a thing of the past in Canada.
