Public Safety Minister Bill Blair appearing as the Minister of Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction to a meeting of the standing committee on Public Safety and National Security in Ottawa on Tuesday, September 25, 2018. iPolitics/Matthew Usherwood

*This story has been updated to note that Minister Blair has in fact tabled the bill and details of the bill’s central functions.

The government has introduced a bill to create a new new oversight agency for the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), as a bill that stalled in the Senate before the election sought to do.

Public Safety Minister Bill Blair posted on Thursday in the Order Paper that he intended to introduce a bill entitled “An Act to amend the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act and the Canada Border Services Agency Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.”

The Order Paper, along with the Notice Paper, is where MPs indicate what they may bring forward in the House of Commons.

Blair introduced the bill for first reading in the House this afternoon after Question Period.

While a spokesperson from Blair’s office wouldn’t say whether his bill would be a replica of Ralph Goodale’s Bill C-98 from the last Parliament, reintroducing legislation that the former public safety minister had previously tried to have passed was one task Prime Minister Justin Trudeau assigned to Blair in his mandate letter.

Public Safety Canada later confirmed the bill was functionally a rehash of C-98 in a statement released Monday afternoon.

READ MORE: Feds table bill creating new review agency for border agency

If passed, the bill will rename the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission the Public Complaints and Review Commission and encapsulate reviews of complaints against CBSA as part of its mandate.

The Civilian Review and Complaints Commission is an oversight agency for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) that operates independent of the national police force. It was created by Parliament in 1988. The existing commission conducts reviews when individuals who’ve complained to the RCMP aren’t satisfied with how their objection was dealt with. The agency the government has tried to create would field complaints about “any non-national security activity of the CBSA” (as Public Safety Canada described it, when Bill C-98 was introduced), which includes complaints about CBSA officers and the quality of agency services.

“The new Public Complaints and Review Commission will fill a gap in our public safety accountability regime, enhance public confidence and strengthen the Canada Border Services Agency,” Goodale said in a statement around the time he introduced the first version of the bill last spring.

Goodale introduced his bill in the House of Commons in early May 2019. It faced little resistance from the opposition, including only three proposed amendments at the committee stage, on its way to passing through the House by mid-June 2019.

READ MORE: House committee passes bill creating new CBSA review body without amendments

A bill can be introduced 48 hours after notice is given for its introduction.

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