Is the glass half-empty or half-full? Well, when it comes to the Canada Border Services Agency, we'd have to say it's much more than half full.
The agency keeps records of complaints received from travellers who feel they've been treated rudely or detained too long at border crossings. But lest one think that there's an epidemic of surliness being unleashed at the border or at airports, the complaints totalled about six a day from Jan. 7 to June 30, 2011.
When you consider the millions of border crossings and arrivals of international flights that occur daily across Canada, six complaints a day is not a drop in the bucket - it's a drop in the ocean.
There are always bound to be hurt feelings, misunderstandings, misperceptions and mistakes when an agency is in the business of dealing with vast numbers of people, as the CBSA is.
The CBSA's 5,500 agents in uniform dealt with more than 90 million members of the travelling public last year, so the complaints make up 0.0025 per cent of those 90 million. Further, the agency's internal investigators found only 129 instances in which an employee's behaviour was legitimately in the wrong.
That's a tremendous record, and certainly nothing to complain about.
