SAN FRANCISCO -- U.S. tour operators that send groups to Canada are
working to overcome a hurdle raised by the enforcement of a
Canadian immigration rule that requires escorts be either Canadian
citizens or Americans carrying work permits.
After the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement and
freeing cross-border trade, the enforcement has come as a surprise
to some tour operators.
"It's a nuisance," said Robert Brennan, president of Brennan
Tours and the National Tour Association.
At the insistence of local guides who say they are losing jobs
to Americans, the Canadian government in the past two years has
enforced a little-known law that makes it illegal for an operator
that runs a tour that begins and ends in Canada to employ a U.S.
citizen without a work permit.
More U.S. tour operators now are hiring Canadian nationals to
run their tours or are changing their itineraries to avoid dealing
with the issue.
"The rule is making some tour operators spend a day or two in
Seattle or Boston instead of starting the tour in Vancouver or
Toronto," said Robert Whitley, president of the U.S. Tour Operators
Association. "We want to let the Canadians know that there is an
economic loss to their tourism industry."
The USTOA, the National Tour Association, the American Bus
Association and several large operators to Canada -- including
Tauck, Collette, Maupintour and Mayflower -- held a joint meeting
last fall on how to deal with the issue.
Jim Santini, the NTA's Washington lobbyist, said the U.S. has
the same requirement of foreign tour operators, so that Canadian
companies operating a tour that begins and ends in the U.S. must
hire U.S. citizens to conduct the tour or get work permits for
their nationals.
Some U.S. operators that have full-time Canadian escorts on
their payroll use those Canadians to run tours in the U.S., so they
have experience with the bureaucracy on the U.S. side and say it is
much more difficult to obtain U.S. temporary-alien work visas than
Canadian work permits.
Santini said he hopes the respective governments rewrite
regulations to give tour operators more flexibility in hiring and
scheduling work for their escorts -- but so far he has hit a
wall.
"We've asked the [U.S.] Department of Commerce to explain the
issue from its perspective but have not gotten a response," Santini
said.
"It's just as much a Canadian issue as it is a U.S. issue."
Randy Durband, vice president of guest relations for Tauck
Tours, said the "ideal situation is to loosen procedures to allow
escorts to have seasonal visas to cross borders. We need to hire
people of different nationalities, and we need open borders to go
about our business."
The problem for U.S. tour operators that employ U.S. or Canadian
citizens as tour escorts, said Whitley, is that getting work
permits is a tedious, time-consuming process.
Brennan, whose company operates a large percentage of its
programs in Canada, has received work permits for some escorts.
"It is difficult if you don't have the time and patience" for
the four-month process involved, Brennan said.
Within the past year, Collette Tours hired 20 full-time Canadian
tour escorts.
Tom Souza, Collette's executive vice president, said Collette
probably would have hired more Canadians, anyway, but the rule
forced the firm to speed up the process and increase the number
hired.
Brennan and Whitley said they do not know of any U.S. tour
operators that have been fined or penalized because of the
rule.
"Tour operators have been given the heads up," said Brennan.
"The governments of both countries are being lenient -- at least on
the first offense."
Tauck Tours, which has specialized in Canada for more than 40
years, has been following the regulations for years, struggling
with the bureaucracy on both sides of the border, said Durband.
"Each year we go to the Canadian Employment Center at each
provincial office to get the work permits," said Durband.
Tauck has to make a case for itself to get the permits,
outlining how many Canadian nationals it is hiring in exchange for
the work permits for the U.S. citizens, and it has to make a case
for a "business need" for the aliens.
"It's all based on reciprocity. They look at our mix of
Canadians and non-Canadians," he said.
"It's cumbersome, bureaucratic red tape," Durband added, but the
permits have always been granted.
The problem comes in timing. The permits must be applied for
months in advance, and often unforeseen occurrences, such as
illness of an escort or a surge in bookings, require more tour
escorts or different ones than planned to conduct the tours, he
said.
Getting permits for Tauck's Canadian guides to work in the U.S.
is "much worse," Durband said. "If the U.S. made it easier, the ire
of the Canadians would die down."