The Conservative Party’s shadow transport minister called, while visiting Sarnia-Lambton, on Canada to dump an ArriveCAN app opponents say hurts border communities.
Melissa Lantsman, a Thorndale MP who serves as the Conservative critic for transportation, toured the Sarnia area Friday with Marilyn Gladu, MP for Sarnia-Lambton and the party’s associate shadow minister for international trade and supply chains. The party uses the term shadow minister for its MPs who hold official critic portfolios.
“ArriveCAN is something we consistently heard from just about everyone we talked to – from tourism operators to industry trying to make deals across the border,” Lantsman said.
“People do not want to come, and the regulations are certainly redundant.”
While Canada no longer requires travelers entering the country in places like Sarnia’s neighbor Point Edward, where the Blue Water Bridge connects Ontario and Michigan, they are still required to fill out the ArriveCAN app in advance to prove vaccination status.
“There’s a whole lot of things that we expect from our American friends that they are not willing to do,” Lantsman said. “That’s hurting us.”
Sarnia Mayor Mike Bradley has joined other border mayors and duty free operators calling for Canada to scrap requirements for the app.
“These kinds of things say Canada is closed for business,” Lantsman said.
“And when we have that coupled with a transportation network that just isn’t conducive to the potential in this area, we have a recipe for disaster,” she said.
Gladu said she and Lantsman spent the day Friday hearing about the area’s oversize load corridor project, opportunities at Sarnia Harbour, the closed Sombra ferry and Chris Hadfield Sarnia Airport where commercial flights ended in 2020.
“It’s questionable why anybody would call it an airport with no commercial passenger service,” Lantsman said.
“It was an empty airport, an empty parking lot and it could have been a big boon for the municipality,” she said.
Lantsman also heard about the area’s limited VIA Rail passenger train service.
“One in and one out is certainly not enough for a community as big as this one,” she said.
They also visited local industry, including businesses building industrial modules that use the oversize load corridor, “so she could see the breadth and the opportunity in Sarnia, and the fact that the lack of rail service, the lack of air service – all these things are really limiting the economic development potential,” Gladu said.
“I hear Marilyn advocating for all of these things in Ottawa quite often and it’s very different when you get to see if for yourself and really understand the impact on the community, the people, the industry,” Lantsman said.
She hears the same story across Canada, Lantsman said. “How do we do so little with so much? There’s so much potential here.”
Canada’s transportation systems don’t get the attention they need from the federal government, Lantsman said.
“I don’t think anybody sees transportation as a driver of economic activity,” she said.
“If the networks were more connected, if this community was serviced more,” it could “bring so much more to the economy,” Lantsman said.
“We’ve got smart people doing smart things here, and we ought to share that with the rest of the country and the rest of the world.”
With files from Jane Sims of the London Free Press