ArriveCan app could have use beyond pandemic, public safety minister says

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said the much-criticized ArriveCan app could help speed up border bottlenecks and may have uses beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

During a tour at a customs checkpoint in Windsor, Ont. Tuesday, Mendicino said the ArriveCan app — the COVID-19 screening tool border city mayors have asked the government to scrap — could be a useful technology moving forward. 

"ArriveCan was originally created for the purposes of COVID-19 but it has technological capacity beyond that to really shrink the amount of time that is required when you're getting screened at the border," he said. 

"So that's the vision is really to utilize the platform to decrease the amount of time, so CBSA officers can really focus on the problem areas, like if you're trying to smuggle a gun or trying to smuggle drugs."

The app was introduced during the pandemic to allow travellers to report their trips and vaccination status. Ottawa requires that travellers use the ArriveCan mobile app, or its desktop version, to submit their travel and COVID-19-related health information before arriving in Canada.

Travellers who fail to do so can face a 14-day quarantine and even a $5,000 fine.

Border city mayors say the tool is a barrier for tourists looking to enter Canada, and for trade. 

Some Indigenous people have issues with it, too.

"We have issues with the ArriveCan," Chief Charles Sampson of Walpole Island First Nation told CBC News.

"In particular, our people in many instances don't have the technology to download the app and don't have the necessary iPhones to go back and forth and take with them to their trips to the United States."

Sampson said he was part of a meeting Tuesday morning with the minister's office, saying he told them outright to eliminate the app for his community and all Canadians. 

"In terms of the Jay Treaty [an agreement signed in 1794 by the U.K. and the U.S.], one of the articles in there says that we have free access to go back and forth across the border unmolested," Sampson said at the annual Jay Treaty Border Alliance conference, held in Windsor and Detroit this week and attended by Mendicino. 

"We recognize that and interpret that in modern terms to go back and forth across the border to do our business and come back into Canada without the obstacles and technological issues we have to face." 

Sampson said he believes the app is "redundant" and "unnecessary."