yyztozag

LX87 on Thursday, YUL-ZRH. About 10 or so CBSA agents just past the gate by the entrance to the jetbridge checking everyone’s passport and asking a question. Is this normal? Never experienced this in YYZ and have never heard of such a thing anywhere else in Canada.

asovse1

If it's anything like what USCBP occasionally does for an ex-US flight

There's probably a person of interest on that flight that they're trying to intercept.

Did you see what equipment CBSA had on hand? Did they have a mobile fingerprint reader and maybe an iPad or so to process the (presumed) passenger they're trying to talk to?

yyztozag

Didn’t notice any particular equipment.

FWIW, the question asked was “are you carrying any significant quantities of cash”. It wouldn’t be crazy to connect this question to a particular industry that Switzerland is known for. However, I’ve flown YYZ-ZRH a whole bunch of times and have never experienced this, so it’s likely either someone of interest as you mentioned or just a fairly commonplace procedure at YUL.

Seat13F_AC_CRJ

Not normal, but completely within the CBSA mandate.We're all familiar with providing passport details to the airline for API. The airline provides this data to the destination country (receiving state) at different intervals prior to flight departure. Many countries also receive API transmissions for outbound flights. This allows (just enough) time for analysis and interdiction prior to departure of any targeted travellers.
Or, CBSA could simply ask questions of every traveller.

airoli

On many, many YUL-ZRH flights over the course of the years, I have had this happen once. I guess it's random, low frequency, but not unheard of.

tentseller

Cash + Switzerland + Montreal,

Simple math

Adam Smith

You're over-complicating this. If they're looking for someone specific, they'll know them by sight and by their documents. They're not going to "process" them on the jetbridge, they're going to take the person away, and any processing will occur elsewhere.

But sometimes this is just random. They do it to keep travellers on their toes, see what they might find, and keep themselves sharp. Watch a few episodes of Border Security and you'll see it in action.

You're over-indexing on one experience. I can't say for sure whether flights to ZRH get targeted more often, but I've experienced this at YYC, YVR, and YYZ. None of those on flights to ZRH. And I know people in YUL who've taken that LX flight many times and never had it on that flight.

Stereotype + stereotype = useless post. Simple math.

yyztozag

Certain destinations are targeted by CBSA for various crimes/people. Flights from Jamaica are (often) checked for stowaways, single young women from SE Asia will (often) be more scrutinized upon arrival in YVR, and hippy-looking guys will (often) have their cars searched for drugs at land borders. These may be stereotypes, but it’s just the way border agencies operate. Switzerland’s banking industry might have nothing to do with my flight’s screening, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable possibility/assumption.

Adam Smith

No one's disputing that. But huge extrapolations are being made from one data point that somehow YUL-ZRH is targeted more than other flights in general and more than YYZ-ZRH specifically.

You also have no idea what CBSA's targeting metrics are like. It's possible that drug-source countries are targeted most often, that other western European countries are targeted less often, and that ZRH is actually right around average. It's also possible that YYZ-ZRH is targeted 2x as often as YUL-ZRH and that the small sample size of your personal experience is not at all representative - you've flown YUL-ZRH only once, and how much is "a while bunch of times" to ZRH? Even if you fly it once a quarter, 4x a year, that's barely 1% of the segments it operates (assuming it's still daily; if less so, the number might be a bit higher).
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The data simply doesn't support the conclusions being drawn.

TravellingChris

It's very rare but outbound checks do happen. We've been traveling overseas for 25 years and we've experienced it maybe twice. On one London-bound flight CBSA was doing an exit inspection looking for violations of the $10,000 cash declaration limit. We had a quick interview and passport check and basically all CBSA asked was how much cash we were carrying (a couple of hundred dollars each) and how we intended to pay for our travels in the UK (mixture of debit and credit). We were sent on our way quickly. If I recall in that instance there was only one passenger where CBSA officers ended up counting a bunch of cash.

More common are the inbound pre-checks at the end of the jetway. We had one when coming from Frankfurt to YYZ a couple of weeks ago. There were a lot of connecting passengers coming from the Subcontinent in particular and CBSA officers were checking everyone's documents before they even got to the CBSA inspection hall. They were asking the non-Canadians why they were coming to the country, who they were meeting (if anyone) and how they were paying for their stay. Those of us with Canadian passports got a quick check and a "Welcome back": no customs questions until we reached the actual checkpoint.

Inbound flights from German hubs seem to get this a lot. We've flown in from other European hubs many times: coming from Warsaw on LOT, for example, we've never experienced these pre-checks.

Adam Smith

I don't know how frequently you have travelled overseas during those 25 years, but I've had checks on outbound flights at least twice in the past year, maybe three times, and just from the past few years, I can think of a bunch more. And I can think of only a couple of times ever that I have seen CBSA checking people on the jetbridge when coming back in.

I don't purport to have sufficient data to make a definitive statement, but my anecdotal evidence is vastly different, and I don't see how it's logical for CBSA to devote significant resources to screening people they're going to screen again in a few minutes anyway - obviously sometimes it will be useful, perhaps to snag a particular individual before they get to the customs hall, but generally it's inefficient; outbound checks might also in theory be somewhat inefficient given pax are less likely to be carrying contraband or otherwise creating trouble for Canada on their way out of the country, but given the banking that exists at many of the large airports, the departures often occur at times when there are fewer international passengers arriving. So I would strongly disagree about the relative frequency of these types of checks.

TravellingChris

We've traveled extensively for the past 20+ years...81 countries and counting.

We find the inbound pre-checks seem to be common on flights from German hubs (FRA, MUC)--I'm assuming because those airports get a lot of connecting traffic from Africa, the Mideast and the Subcontinent. Never experienced them coming from minor hubs like WAW (which doesn't have a lot of non-European connecting flights in comparison with, say, FRA). I think the CBSA's logic is that they want to pre-identify foreign nationals whose documents or itineraries warrant extra scrutiny (i.e. people who will have to undergo secondary immigration inspection). As I noted, Canadians sail through these checks so they're not for customs purposes.

Again, as I said we've encountered the outbound checks much more rarely.

I can't speak for anyone else's experience, only ours.

GUWonder

In the range of normal as a typical un(der)declared money hunt by CBSA. They copy the US CBP, just not so much as to do this as often and widely as the US CBP. It also tends to be more route specific, with some routes being made somewhat higher priority targets for such searches while other routes are not. Sometimes they have a specific individual or group of individuals in mind when doing these stops/searches; but even then, they very, very infrequently come up catching someone for an illegal “cash” export attempt. Generally, these tend to be fishing expeditions that aren’t fruitful.