The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) is a Public Safety Portfolio agency that reports to the Minister of Public Safety.
The CBSA is responsible for providing integrated border services that support national security, public safety and economic prosperity priorities, and facilitate the free flow of persons and goods, including animals and plants, that meet all requirements under the program legislation. The CBSA administers more than 90 acts, regulations and international agreements, many on behalf of other federal departments and agencies, the provinces and the territories.
In support of these acts and regulations the CBSA, in co-operation with its portfolio partners, is part of the National Integrated Interagency Information (N-III) program, which addresses the need for a national approach to linking information within individual, disparate information systems across the public safety and security sector throughout Canada. N-III encompasses an interagency, interdisciplinary and intergovernmental information system for retrieving, accessing and using law enforcement information among federal, provincial, territorial and municipal partners of Canada's public safety and security community.
The N-III program, led by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and Public Safety Canada (PS), is developing two tools to address information sharing needs: the Police Information Portal (PIP) for sharing information among police and the Integrated Query Tool (IQT) for sharing law enforcement information with Public Safety and Security (PS&S) departments or agencies. The IQT will allow CBSA users, authorized to access IQT, to query and retrieve an index of information, related to individuals and vehicles, held in the RCMP's Police Information Retrieval System (PIRS) and Police Reporting and Occurrence System (PROS).
The Privacy Impact Assessment examined the impact associated with the RCMP's sharing of its law enforcement information with the CBSA through the IQT. The assessment determined there was none or little impact.