Duncan Dee, a former CEO of Air Canada, says many of these delays stem from staffing levels at customs and immigration offices at Toronto Pearson International Airport that are not well equipped to cope with the increase in passenger traffic. the COVID-19 border measures. creating a domino effect of delays. “Each of the travelers is in control. And now it takes four times longer than before the pandemic,” he told CTV News on Wednesday. Before the pandemic, it took 30 to 60 seconds to check a passenger for customs and immigration. Today, Dee says the process takes four to five minutes, thanks in large part to COVID-19-related control questions through the ArriveCAN app and vaccine certification testing. “You have quadrupled the time it takes them to process each traveler. So if you do not quadruple the number of people doing the processing, you will be late,” he said. Travelers unfamiliar with the ArriveCAN system may not have completed the application form correctly. They may have a vaccination certificate that is not in English or French, or the type of vaccine may not be available in Canada, such as the Russian Sputnik V vaccine. Some travelers may even be randomly selected to take the COVID test. 19 on arrival. All of this adds another “level of complexity” to Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) officials, Dee says. “CBSA officers are some of the best around. These people do a great job and usually work extremely fast, but you put them in a position where they try to enforce orders that are completely impossible to meet on schedule,” he said. . Delays and long queues at customs in turn create a knock-down effect that creates more delays for incoming international travelers who have not got off the plane. Dee says that to avoid overcrowding at the terminal, incoming planes will be instructed by air traffic control to wait on the tarmac until some of the customs line delays are cleared. And even when passengers start disembarking, they can only allow 10 to 50 passengers per half hour to get off the plane at a time, in order to avoid a crash at the terminal. “If you have 250 people on a plane, with 50 every half hour, you suddenly count another hour and a half before everyone leaves the plane. But that’s not even the end. They arrive at customs and are behind a two-hour line before they even see an officer. “, Di explained. “It all adds up … and it’s six and a half hours before they get in a taxi or go home and it’s just not viable.”
AIRPORT PROBLEMS EXPECTED UNTIL SEPTEMBER
As more travelers are expected in July and August, Dee says the problems at Pearson will get worse. “It’s a simple mathematical equation. There are 22 to 24 percent more travelers in July and August than there were in May and April and there were lineups in May and April. You could just imagine what happens when there are even more travelers. “July and August,” he said. But issues at Pearson are not the only Canadian problem. As Transport Minister Omar Alghabra pointed out, many European airports have also suffered from delays and long queues, sometimes extending beyond the terminal. In an effort to address these delays, Alghabra said the federal government is hiring 400 new CATSA control officers and is considering making “more adjustments” to COVID-19 travel rules. But McGill University aviation expert John Gradek says the biggest blame lies with airlines, not CATSA or CBSA. “The main reason is that there are too many passengers coming in and out of airports out of airport capacity,” Gradek told CTV News on Wednesday. Some European airports, such as Amsterdam Schiphol and London Heathrow, have asked airlines to reduce their flights and reduce the number of passengers to avoid overcrowding. Gradek believes similar requests should be made to Canadian airlines. “Airlines are hungry for money. They are hungry for revenue. So, they will put their suitcases on their routes. They will want to have more and more passengers on their planes, to generate more revenue,” he said. . “Someone has to step up and basically say, ‘X percentage of your flights, you have to reduce.’ Both Gradek and Dee expect the delays to plague Pearson and other airports around the world until September, after the end of the summer travel season. “Airlines have not yet seen the best passenger numbers. Airports have not yet seen the worst of their delays,” Gradek said.
