In my early 20s, I spent almost five years working for what was then known as Canada Customs, first as a university student, and then full-time for three years.

It seems a long time ago, and in speaking last week with Kim Scoville, director of the Pacific Highway District for Canada Border Services Agency last week, it also seems like it was in another world.

CBSA is the successor to customs. It has integrated the customs and immigration services that used to be quite rigidly separated at border points — and that’s a good thing, as many of the issues that come to the attention of those who question travellers are immigration-related.

Scoville is in charge of the five border crossings in the Lower Mainland. The two busiest ones are in Surrey, at Douglas (the Peace Arch) and Pacific Highway, where the vast majority of commercial shipments entering or leaving B.C. for the United States are processed.

The Huntingdon crossing in Abbotsford is also a commercial entry point, and is the third-busiest crossing. Aldergrove is less busy, and only deals with limited commercial shipments — a fact which has become newsworthy in the past few months, and one which Scoville addressed at some length in his speech to the Greater Langley Chamber of Commerce.

The quietest of the five crossings is at Boundary Bay in Delta, which deals with traffic coming from Point Roberts, an isolated peninsula of the U.S. located south of Tsawwassen.

The Aldergrove CBSA office will be replaced by a new building in the next couple of years, and one thing CBSA had been considering as part of that replacement project was redirecting all commercial shipments to Huntingdon or Pacific Highway. The main reason officials were considering such a move is security.

A small percentage of commercial trucks are being used for serious smuggling, usually of drugs but on occasion of other material. Expensive scanning equipment is used by CBSA and by U.S. officials to try and detect hidden compartments and other places where the smuggled goods are hidden.

It’s a far cry from what we dealt with at the border when I worked there. There were far fewer trucks crossing the border than there are today, and we didn’t even have drug-sniffing dogs, let alone high-tech equipment. Most of the truckers we dealt with were regulars, who crossed the border as part of their regular routes, and the main challenges we had were with drivers who were unfamiliar with Canada, and were used to carrying loaded guns in their trucks. We sent them back to the U.S. to leave their guns there, before allowing them to cross.

Scoville has listened to concerns raised by the chamber and others about commercial shipments at Aldergrove. He says there will be an opportunity for some shipments to be processed there when the new facility is built, likely under some kind of permit system. It’s an important concession, because many businesses in the Aldergrove area relocated there specifically because it is close to a border crossing.

In the long run though, there will need to be sophisticated detectors at Aldergrove. It’s the era we live in.