Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the technical staff for their hard work to keep the committee moving.
I submitted a notice of motion on Friday, February 2. I hope members have a copy of it. I intend to move that motion now.
The motion states:
That, given that the Port of Montreal, a major hub for stolen vehicles to be shipped out of Canada, only has five Canada Border Service Agents to inspect the 580,000 containers that leave the port each year, according to the Le Journal de Montréal, with one law enforcement agent saying, “CBSA has no resources to check the containers, they check less than one per cent of containers,”
The committee report to the House its concern with these reports and calls on the Government to immediately address these resource shortages, as the CBSA falls under the Federal Government’s mandate.
This motion comes, obviously, out of a Journal de Montréal report. It talks about the involvement of the Port of Montreal, which falls under the mandate of this committee through the Minister of Transport.
I would note also that we're hearing reports, or we've had individuals confirm, that vehicles stolen in the greater Toronto area are often put in railway cars and shipped to the port of Montreal, where they make their way out of the country on ships.
This is clearly something that this committee should express its concern with, when we see a 300% increase in stolen vehicles in the GTA and 100% increase in Montreal. This is clearly part of the system. The port is a part of the federal government's responsibility. It's an asset that the federal government is responsible for, and it's being used by organized crime to ship Canadian stolen vehicles abroad.
Clearly, there's a resource issue there if we're talking about 1% of containers being examined. We need to take a whole-of-government approach on this. That includes tightening up the ports and expressing our concern with the lack of resources at the Port of Montreal.
I'm hoping that we can have a discussion about that. I think it would be helpful to express that to the House to let them know that we are monitoring the situation and that we are concerned with the rising problem of auto theft and the port of Montreal being a conduit for vehicles leaving the country after they've been stolen.
I think this falls well within our mandate. It's something that we should discuss, and we should advise the House of our concern.
I'm happy to start the discussion. I hope we can vote in favour of this today.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.