TRGO Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORT AND GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS

LE COMITÉ PERMANENT DES TRANSPORTS ET DES OPÉRATIONS GOUVERNEMENTALES

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Tuesday, November 20, 2001

• 1536

[English]

The Chair (Mr. Ovid Jackson (Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, Lib.)): Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I think I see a quorum, so I'll start the proceedings.

With us today from Citizenship and Immigration Canada is Joan Atkinson, the Assistant Deputy Minister, and from Foreign Affairs and International Trade we have Kathy McCallion, Assistant Deputy Minister, and Michael Hutton, chief executive officer of the passport office.

Welcome, ladies and gentleman. As we said before, we'll hear your presentations, and then we'll open it for a round of questions. Thank you.

Ms. Joan Atkinson (Assistant Deputy Minister, Policy and Program Development, Citizenship and Immigration Canada): I think we agreed that I would start with an opening statement, and then Ms. McCallion will make an opening statement, and then we will take your questions.

Let me start by saying how pleased I am to be in front of the committee this afternoon to be able to speak to airline and airport security and CIC's role in that.

I think I would like to start by talking to you a little about what our strategy is to detect and exclude from Canada those who pose a security threat, because it is multifaceted, and we really need to start by looking at our missions abroad, and specifically our visa offices abroad in those missions where we have CIC personnel. The visa screen abroad is the first line of defence, if you will, by which we screen individuals who are seeking entry to Canada, determine whether they are admissible or not, and issue them the appropriate documents if they are admissible.

Obviously, not all people go through visa offices abroad, but people do get on airplanes in foreign airports to come to Canada. That then becomes our second line of defence, if you will, and at international airports we work very closely with airlines through our network of immigration control officers, who train airlines on detection of fraudulent documents and work with airlines to try to deter improperly documented people from getting on airplanes to come to Canada in the first instance. With the airline companies, we have a series of obligations and responsibilities that the current Immigration Act and the new Immigration Act impose on airline companies.

It is the responsibility of airline companies to ensure that they are carrying people to Canada who have the proper documentation to enter Canada. Those responsibilities are enforced through a series of administrative fines or fees that airlines incur if they carry improperly documented passengers to Canada who are subsequently directed to inquiry or go into the refugee determination process. We work this through a system of memorandums of understandings with airline companies, and we have an incentive program, if you will, through those MOUs and through our administrative fee structure. If you comply with the MOU and do a good job of detecting improperly documented passengers, the fees that are charged when someone is carried by an airline to Canada with improper documents are greatly reduced.

Once a person arrives at a Canadian airport, we then have the opportunity of examining them on arrival. We have, as you know, the primary inspection line, which is staffed by customs, but before the primary inspection line, we use what we call disembarkation and response teams, who will, on the basis of intelligence, go to particular airlines or flights as they arrive and examine individuals and their documents as they get off the planes. Persons who arrive at the primary inspection line, if customs determines that there's an issue, are referred to a secondary, and ultimately, we have the processes in Canada through our immigration procedures to deal with those who are in Canada, for detention, if they're a risk, and removal.

• 1540

I'd like to talk a little bit about each of those issues, if I may.

We currently have 44 immigration control officers posted abroad in 40 strategic locations. The network of immigration control officers was established in 1989 as one of the key elements in our immigration control strategy. I must tell you that this particular model has been replicated by a number of countries. It is seen as being a very successful strategy for deterring undocumented and improperly documented people from coming to Canada.

The ICOs, as I said, spend a great deal of their time in liaison with airlines, in training airlines to detect fraudulent documents, in providing airlines with advice and guidance when they are dealing with improperly documented individuals. But ICOs also promote international cooperation in the countries in which they are posted, with our partners in those countries and with those host governments, to try to counter illegal migration more generally, through joint operations, for example, at airports and liaison activities.

They also gather information and intelligence on the use of documentation by irregular migrants on the sorts of routes that are used by those who would smuggle individuals into the country. All this information and intelligence is collected and kept in a database, which we use to analyse and report out and provide further information to support our immigration control officers, and indeed our visa officers. We also share that information with our partners, both in Canada and in other countries.

With the transportation company obligations I talked about, we deal with this through memorandums of understanding with the transportation companies. Through the MOU process a company agrees to implement effective and ongoing document screening procedures. If they do so, they benefit by way of reduced administrative fees. The MOU provisions include things like standards on document screening, use of technological aids, training of personnel in document screening, fraud prevention, gate checks, information exchange, holding of documents, and performance standards in respect of these particular initiatives.

Third, the disembarkation and response teams that can deal with individuals once they arrive in Canada do deal with people on flights who have been identified through the use of intelligence as potentially raising a particular issue or concern. They will meet those planes on arrival. They will go right on the plane before passengers disembark or as passengers are disembarking and check the documents of passengers as they're getting off the plane. This is of great assistance to us, because one of the difficulties we run into is people who have documents when they get on the plane, but when they get off the plane and arrive at the primary inspection line, no longer have a document.

The DART teams are used selectively to target certain flights where we think there may be a problem and to try to match the person to the document as they're getting off the plane, so there's no loss of document between getting off the plane and arriving at the primary inspection line.

As I said, Canada Customs and Revenue Agency officers are on the primary inspection line. All travellers are thus interviewed or seen by a customs officer, and the customs officer has the discretion to refer travellers to secondary examinations conducted by an immigration officer. There are mandatory referral lists, which include persons who are believed to be inadmissible; persons other than Canadians who have been charged or convicted of a criminal offence; persons where referral has been requested by Immigration; persons who are claiming refugee status or asylum; persons who are intending to stay longer than six months; persons who are intending immigrants and are seeking landing as permanent residents in Canada.

• 1545

At immigration secondary the traveller may be simply asked further questions and then admitted, if the immigration officer determines that they are admissible and there is no further problem. They may be issued with documentation if they are coming to Canada seeking to work or to study and they meet the requirements; they may be issued with a work permit or a student authorization; they may be issued with a visitor record if the immigration officer determines that it's required; they may be reported as being inadmissible to Canada and then sent on further, in due course, to an inquiry with a adjudicator; if the immigration officer determines that they may be inadmissible, they may be given the opportunity of withdrawing that application and returning to the country from whence they came.

We do detain in certain situations. We can detain individuals on arrival if we determine that their identity needs to be established, if they are suspected of being a security risk, if they pose a danger to the public, or if we believe there is a high risk of flight, that is, they are unlikely to appear for any further inquiries or examinations.

Once a person is admitted to Canada, if they've been determined to be admissible, or they're making a refugee claim and they are admitted to Canada, if they go through the process, whatever process they are in, and we determine that they are inadmissible and likely or eligible to be removed, we then, of course, can take steps to remove them.

In all situations where we are looking at removals, we do a risk assessment, and we set our priorities in respect of removals. Those who are of most concern to us are obviously those who may pose a threat to public safety. We are talking about criminals, terrorists, and other individuals who may pose a threat to national security or public safety. Those individuals are our first priority for removal. Following security threats and those who are a danger, our next priority is refused refugee claimants, individuals who have been through the refugee determination system, have exercised all their rights of appeal, and have been determined not to be in need of protection.

In every case we do an individual risk assessment, if it is required. If individuals pose a safety or security risk, they may be escorted by CIC removals officers out of the country. In that process we follow all the international standards and guidelines that are applicable to removals of individuals who may be dangerous, including the Convention on International Civil Aviation, Canadian aviation security measures, the International Air Transport Association control authorities working group guidelines on deportation and escort, and the escort policy of individual airlines, including Air Canada. We work very closely with the transportation industry and with airlines when we are effecting removals.

An airline must pay the costs of removal of any person whom it conveyed, provided that an immigration officer did not grant admission to that person and that person was not in possession of a valid and subsisting visa on arrival. In addition to the obligation on the part of transportation companies to ensure that they are carrying people to Canada who have the proper documents, and where there may be administrative fees imposed, it's also their responsibility to pay the removal costs, if we remove someone who did not have the proper document on presentation in Canada.

Refugee claimants are allowed into Canada to have their claim heard. If, at the end of the day, a negative decision is rendered, the airline company is again responsible for the costs associated with that removal, as legal liability rests with the carrier operating the vehicle when it arrives in Canada, regardless of which carrier actually sold the ticket.

That gives you, in a very brief and broad sense, our immigration control strategy, and how we work with airlines to attempt to maintain the flow of legitimate travellers into Canada, while at the same time protecting the safety and security of Canadians and deterring, detecting, detaining, and removing those who may pose a security threat.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Ms. McCallion.

Ms. Kathryn E. McCallion (Assistant Deputy Minister, Corporate Services, Passport and Consular Affairs, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. I'm pleased to be here this afternoon, and as the chair has already said, I'm accompanied by Michael Hutton, who is the chief executive officer of the passport office.

• 1550

I will make a brief statement about a series of measures we are taking to ensure the security and integrity of the Canadian passport since September 11. And then, naturally, we'll be happy to take your questions.

First, as a background comment, the passport office is a special operating agency of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

[Translation]

Each year, almost two million Canadians get a passport.

[English]

Millions more pass through our borders and travel abroad using a Canadian passport with pride, and we are encouraging all Canadians to consider carrying their passports for travel to and from the United States.

[Translation]

Before presenting the different measures, I would like to inform the committee members of the constant efforts made by the Passport Office to maintain and increase the security and integrity of the Canadian passport.

[English]

The issue of the integrity of the passport can be divided into two parts, the application process and improvements to the actual booklet itself.

A cornerstone of the passport office efforts to improve the security and integrity of the Canadian passport is the deployment of an identification and retrieval information system called IRIS, which has been gradually phased into passport offices over the last two years. The passport office developed and implemented an on-site, on-line verification system that equips passport examiners with the tools they need to carry out more stringent and immediate verification of incoming passport data. This identification and information retrieval system is now in place at all regional offices where passport applications are processed. IRIS has substantially increased the security, efficiency, and thoroughness of passport processing, ensuring that applicants are who they say they are and that they are entitled to bear a Canadian passport.

IRIS is an on-line data bank with enabling technology that will allow the passport office to develop in the near future a more tamper-proof passport. IRIS is, indeed, integral to the process of converting bearer photographs and information into digital form for printing in the passport. It provides any authorized passport officer with access to photographs, applications, supporting documentation, and information on guarantors. IRIS is designed to be upgraded to add new features as warranted, ensuring that the Canadian passport processing system will continue to be at the forefront of innovative, secure technology for years to come. We are proud of the fact that IRIS is a made-in-Canada technology that we believe is the best in the world. It's actually produced by AIT in Ottawa, our development partner.

[Translation]

However, these are not the only changes the Passport Office has worked on in recent months. Following the tragic events of September 11, the Passport Office adopted a series of measures for maintaining the security and integrity of the Canadian passport.

One of the first measures is a more thorough investigation of sponsors to ensure that they have really known the applicants for several years. As you know, to apply for a passport, the name of a sponsor must be provided, i.e. the name of a person who can confirm the person's identity. Many countries, including the United States, do not even require sponsors. This measure will help further improve our security and investigation processes.

In addition to this measure, the passport application form will also be reviewed. As of March 2002, applicants will be required to provide investigators with additional information, including their professional backgrounds and former addresses. These details will provide investigators with additional information for more thoroughly verifying the identities and backgrounds of applicants.

[English]

To proceed with the more comprehensive background checks and enhanced verification processes, the passport office is currently hiring and training 63 additional passport staff.

[Translation]

Since September 11, the Passport Office has been installing security cameras in each of the 28 regional Passport Offices. This measure is in addition to the deployment of security guards in these offices to ensure not only the security of the buildings and their personnel, but also that of the Canadians who visit them.

• 1555

[English]

In addition to the above measures, the passport office is accelerating the development of two significant projects to support the development of further new technology and the immediate implementation of additional security measures to safeguard the integrity of Canada's passport system.

Part of the efforts will be directed to implementing a biometrics pilot project using facial recognition software to ensure that no known or suspected members of terrorist organizations will be able to use Canadian passports. This trial, which will begin in March of next year, will use facial recognition to compare photographs of Canadian passport applicants against law enforcement image data banks.

[Translation]

Another project was developed to set up a security system to verify data directly with provincial and territorial governments. This initiative is part of the Government On-line program initiated by the federal government. A pilot project will be launched next year. The system will establish a link between the Passport Office and the provincial and territorial vital statistics or registry offices. This will help verify the birth and baptismal certificates used for 65% of all passport applications.

[English]

We are also working with our colleagues in CIC to improve the integrity of the citizenship document, for example, to make it more difficult to forge.

With all these changes, the Government of Canada is committed to ensuring that our Canadian passport stands for two things, security and integrity. We want Canadians to know their passports are the most secure identification documents, and respected as such, anywhere in the world.

[Translation]

The Canadian passport will continue, today and for many years to come, to satisfy the most thorough examination both at home and abroad.

[English]

Thank you very much.

[Translation]

Thank you very much.

[English]

The Chair: Thank you very much.

We'll start the first round with Paul Forseth from the Alliance Party.

Mr. Paul Forseth (New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby, Canadian Alliance): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I came in on a presentation about preventing, I suppose, inappropriate individuals from getting on airplanes. Certainly, September 11 has given us a heightened degree of concern. But I wanted to ask regarding the staffing issues that have been noted by the department.

Repeatedly, we've heard that you're under-resourced to deliver the statutory requirements. What about the practical issues of pouching on high-risk flights, and also the pre-delivery of manifests on particular flights, to give our local authorities in an airport a leg up when they're going to deal with specifically high-risk flights? Perhaps we could have some comment about that first.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Advance passenger information or passenger name record is, we think, a very important tool that will assist us in trying to detect those who may pose a threat or may not be admissible to Canada. Our new Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which as you know got royal assent on November 1, will give us the authority to require advance passenger information and passenger name records from airlines.

We are working with the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency. Their new legislation similarly gives them the authority to collect this information. Obviously, we want to make sure we have a system that works for both agencies at the border. We are also working with our American colleagues, because our ultimate goal here is to be able to share the data with our American colleagues as well, so that we have a robust database that can target individuals who may pose a threat to either Canada or the United States, and so that we can exchange those data. So we are ensuring that we have the proper legislative authorities to do so, ensuring that we respect all the privacy rights of individuals who are providing information to the carriers.

As for pouching of documents, airlines do have that possibility. It does pose a bit of a delicate situation for airlines, because obviously, they're worried about their relationship with their passengers and they're worried about client service. It is not an easy situation for an airline to pouch certain documents—which individuals will you ask to give you the documents? Airlines are rather sensitive to the fact that they may be accused of profiling on the basis of race or ethnicity, and so they are hesitant to do that, for obvious reasons. Do you pouch all documents? That's certainly not something airlines have wanted to do, and passengers are not necessarily that keen to give their documents to an airline agent.

• 1600

So the option we are exploring with the airline industry is looking at the technology that is available to scan documents. In the context of obtaining advance passenger information, there is the technology to scan documents when an individual checks in or when an individual checks in at the gate, and that information then could go into a database or could be downloaded or sent electronically to inspection agencies at the point of arrival. That's clearly something we think we should be looking at, and we are discussing and looking at that with the airlines.

Mr. Paul Forseth: Isn't it possible that actually Osama bin Laden could come to Canada? If he would not be recognized, that individual could come with fake documents, get on an airplane, and as soon as he arrives here, claim refugee status. Then he is admitted into the determination process, and even fingerprinted, and in the verification of that fingerprint, what are you going to check it against? There's probably no record in North America at all. So more than likely that individual, Mr. bin Laden, would be released into the community and, like a large proportion of them, would eventually disappear and would not remain engaged in the refugee determination process.

So when we talk about the new processes, we have to be clear about what we are checking the fingerprints against. I want to know what efforts are being made to improve the database sources, so that when we outline these wonderful things the law can do and the systems and the efforts we're going to make, it is worthwhile, because a fingerprint is only as good as the information you can check it against. There's that whole context of the quality of information that you can talk about.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: I absolutely agree with you that the system only works well if the quality of the information is very high.

When we look at the immigration context, at any point where we have a checkpoint, if you will, whether it's a visa office or someone checking in or at the gate before they get on a plane to come to Canada or at a transit point, what we are doing is checking a person against a document against our intelligence, and that intelligence can be a database. It may be a database that has fingerprints in it, it may be a database that has digital photos in it, it may be a database that has names and dates of birth and physical characteristics. It may also be the judgment of an individual visa officer or airline agent who is checking that document and that person and suspects or has some reason to think that something is not quite right, and then does some further investigation or further examination of that individual.

The intelligence, however, is absolutely crucial, you're quite right. A large part of what we are doing now across the federal government and working with provincial law enforcement agencies, and indeed, working with our American counterparts and other countries, is looking at ways in which we can share that intelligence and those data, because our intelligence is only as good as the information we're able to collect and our ability to apply that intelligence.

Ms. McCallion talked about facial recognition technology and comparing photographs against a law enforcement database's digitalized photographs. That's another tool that any of the border agencies around the world, ourselves included, needs to be able to tap into, because you're quite right, terrorists generally have some of the most sophisticated fraudulent documents in the world. They are very effective in evading controls. They will use perfectly legitimate documents in their own name, issued to them very legitimately, by legal and lawful means, to enter a country, including the United States or Canada. Our challenge is to try to determine those who may pose a threat to us using a variety of tools at our disposal, because it's not just going to be one particular approach or one particular tool that is going be able to find the Osama bin Ladin as he attempts to enter the country.

• 1605

Mr. Paul Forseth: A note here says ICOs stopped 6,271 persons attempting to travel to Canada using improper, counterfeit, altered, or false documents in the year 2000, and those were non-Canadian documents. Fortunately, we were able to find that many, but at the same time, I understand about 2,200 were using Canadian passports or the IM 1000 or visas. We know that throughout the world today the IM 1000 is still being cranked out—I've seen those machines still cranking them out—so it's going to take a while before that document, which is in disrepute, is going to be replaced. It's going to take a long time.

What about the passport itself? Where are we in that regard with respect to improving the level of confidence, and also the confidence for visas? I understand there's basically only one passport in the world that has some kind of magnetic stripe reader in it that provides a lot of additional information. I forget which country it is, but I think there's only one country. It seems there's a lot to be done to improve the confidence level in our own material, knowing that people are coming with Canadian passports they shouldn't have or visas they shouldn't have or misusing the IM 1000 document. I'm trying to look at what's in our own control before we even look at the 6,000 we're talking about of other countries.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Perhaps I can start by addressing the immigration documents, and then pass it to my colleagues on the passport.

As you know, the minister announced on October 12 that we would be fast-tracking the production of the permanent resident card, also known as the maple leaf card. The purpose of this document is to replace the immigrant visa and record of landing—the IM 1000 document that you refer to—which we know is very prone to fraudulent use and very prone to people using it to misrepresent themselves. It has been our objective to remove that document from circulation, and the permanent resident card will allow us to do that.

The permanent resident card is a state-of-the-art security document. It is a plastic card that will meet all the ICAO standards for secure documents. It will have all the most up-to-date security features that are available, including an optical stripe on the back of the card that will have information embedded on it that is currently found on the immigrant visa and record of landing. The card itself is very important, obviously, because the current document is used and abused, but just as important is the process by which those documents are issued.

You mention the Canadian visitor visa. Again, that is a counterfoil that is put on a passport. It has a great many security features in it. It is very difficult to tamper with it once it's placed on a passport—it tears apart, there are many security features on that document. Yet that document can be abused as well. So you go back to your screening procedures and the processes you have in place to try to detect those who are not eligible to receive those documents. That takes you back to your visitor visa screening process and the sort of assessment visa officers make before they issue visitor visas to individuals.

The permanent resident card we hope to be able to have ready for use by the end of June 2002. It is on a fast-track. It will take some time for all the existing immigrant visas and records of landing to be out of circulation. I don't have the exact figures in my head, but we have to deal not just with newly arriving permanent residents, but with all the permanent residents who are living in Canada. So we will not be able to issue permanent resident cards to all of them all at once, it will be phased in. It is clearly our intention to take that document out of circulation as quickly as we can.

• 1610

Ms. Kathryn McCallion: Let me address this by restating something I should have made a little clearer in the opening statement. There are two parts to the process with the passport. There's the viability or integrity of the document itself. We have spent the last couple of years working very intensely on improving the physical document, making it the hardest, or one of the hardest, in the world to duplicate or to adapt or to change pictures in. The new booklet, when it is ready for production, will have several security features, one of which will be that the picture will be actually impregnated in the paper and it will not be under the plastic laminate with which you are familiar, which makes the document much more difficult to tamper with, but not 100% tamper-proof—no bureaucrat would tell you that they finally figured out 100%.

The second part of the process is what we call the breeder documents: how do you prove you're eligible to get that document issued to you? We've been working on those processes. I myself have met with the registrars of the provinces and the territories. We do have problems if you're born in Nova Scotia and you die in B.C.; there's no interconnecting link at the moment that's readily available. Due to privacy and other concerns, a national data bank on individuals is not in existence, and there's a measure of concern about creating one.

We do talk and we do try our best to share information and coordinate. I think in the last month or so the challenge for all of us is not that we have the data, or CIC has the data, or the RCMP have the data, it's how we share the data we do have in an open way that's understandable to citizens, but also good for security and validation.

A lot is going to depend, in the near term, on cooperation of people talking and sharing, and over time, I think, we're all working on making the technologies we're all individually working on much more interactive and cooperative. We've recently in the passport office, for instance, agreed to share the data on passports we know are stolen or already fraudulent with the people at the border, which historically, I'm sure, we could have done and we tried, but it wasn't as professionally done as it will be now.

So it's a combination of efforts to improve our processes and our cooperation at the same time as we're starting to build the technologies that can do it for us, like our facial recognition pilot, which will help enormously.

The Chair: Thank you.

I'll move to Mr. Shepherd now of the Liberals for ten minutes.

Mr. Alex Shepherd (Durham, Lib.): I have a personal question you've just touched on. I was in Costa Rica once, and my passport was stolen. I went to the embassy there and they told me they were losing five a week. That's a very small country. Is that a reportable situation, not only in Canada, but in other countries as well, that somebody's travelling with a stolen passport?

Ms. Kathryn McCallion: The passport itself is the property of the issuing state. It says so in the cover. It's yours, but when it's reported lost, when you want another one, we have a documented file that says your passport was issued in this place two years ago; it was stolen in Costa Rica and reported to the embassy as such; a new one was issued. And we keep watch for the original globally.

Mr. Alex Shepherd: So if somebody's travelling in France and they use that passport, does that show up?

Ms. Kathryn McCallion: No. That's the challenge. It doesn't automatically appear on somebody's screen—oops, there's a fraudulent document.

Mr. Alex Shepherd: So we have the reverse problem. If somebody's coming from France to Canada with a stolen passport, we have no idea whether it's been stolen or not?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: It slips over into our immigration control officer network and our visa offices abroad. Perhaps they bought or otherwise obtained that passport, now they may have had to change the photo, because perhaps they don't look close enough to your photo on that passport, and they would have attempted to tamper with that document to change the photo. If that person then tries to board a plane to get to Canada, the airlines are required to verify the document and make sure the person holding it is the rightful holder, whether it's a Canadian passport or whatever.

We train the airlines in fraudulent document detection, and we train them to look specifically for areas where documents might be tampered with, and photo substitution is one of those areas, not just in Canadian documents, but in any other documents that have photos on. That's one of the favourite ways to try to tamper with a document, to try to remove the photo of the rightful holder and substitute your own photo for it.

• 1615

The document forgers are very clever, and we're always trying to make sure we're one step ahead of them, but document forgery is a multi-billion dollar industry around the world. We try to equip our own immigration control officers and we try to equip the airlines as best we can with some training and some equipment, like UV-readers and other such equipment, to help them detect fraudulent documents.

We have to remember that when you're dealing with lots of people going through a check-in or going to a gate, often the best way to pick up someone who may be carrying a fraudulent document is by noticing the behaviour of that individual. We also provide training to airline check-in agents respecting the things to look for in a passenger who may be carrying a fraudulent document. What are the sorts of things you should be looking for that may cause you to look a little bit more carefully at that document? It's not necessarily based on where they're coming from or what kind of accent they have. It's based on things like the kind of baggage they're travelling with, the nature of their trip, what the return portion of their ticket looks like. There are a number of indicators that might lead you to believe that you might want to look at this document a little more carefully.

Mr. Alex Shepherd: I don't know. I heard what you said, but people's photos on passports don't look at all like them, in my experience. I've never heard anybody, as you cross the border point, say, gee, that doesn't look like you. I hear what you're saying, you're trying to reassure us, but I really question whether that's.... The fact of the matter is, you don't have the system tied down. We know these things have been stolen, and yet we have no way to cross-reference them with other countries.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: We do receive information, and we distribute that information, on stolen passports. We do collect, not just from the passport office, but from other passport-issuing agencies around the world that report on passports that are stolen, the information on passport numbers—number so-and-so to such-and-such has been stolen from such-and-such a passport office.

Mr. Alex Shepherd: Is that part of our database?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: That's part of our database, and it then goes out as alerts, not just to our immigration control officers and our visa officers, but to airlines as well. It's airlines' responsibility, working with our immigration control officers, to ensure that the individuals who are checking documents are aware of these alerts and have that information at their disposal about passports that have been stolen from whatever country.

Mr. Alex Shepherd: In the database do you have criminal records? Do you have Interpol statistics?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: There's a mix of things in our database. We start with immigration enforcement data, so we put in our databases our own enforcement information index and our own lookouts. Those lookouts consist of individuals on whom there may be Interpol information. We have access to CPIC, the Canadian Police Information Centre system. We have access to information on known and suspected terrorists, which generally comes to us from CSIS. We are sharing information with the Americans, and so we have access to the American database on known and suspected terrorists, and that goes into our database as well.

The airlines do not have access to that entire database. That would be too much information for an airline check-in agent to deal with. The information we focus on for airlines is the type of information they would require to help them do their job of verifying documents.

For example, if we have detected a particular type of passport that's being used fraudulently or a document that is being used fraudulently or has been tampered with, and it's been used a number of times by individuals trying to board planes to get to Canada, we do up an alert, and we send that alert out to airline companies, so that they can use that information to alert their document-checkers to be on the lookout for this kind of a document and to look at it a little bit more carefully, because a number of individuals had been trying to use this document in this way to board planes to get to Canada.

Mr. Alex Shepherd: With regard to refugees, why the comment that the vast majority of refugee claimants in Canada originate in the United States?

• 1620

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Well, they're not Americans, first of all, let me assure you of that. Almost 40% of the people who claim refugee status in Canada come to us via the United States. They come to us at the land borders. So we know they're coming from the United States because they come to Fort Erie or they come to Lacolle or they come to Douglas, and they claim refugee status on arrival at the border.

Mr. Alex Shepherd: Is it reasonable to assume they've already attempted to apply for refugee status in the United States?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Some of them have, and we are working with the Americans on that particular issue. We put in place a pilot project last year with the Americans where we exchanged the fingerprint data. They provided us with access to their fingerprint data system at Lacolle, one of our busier border crossing points, where we do get a fair number of refugee claimants who come to us from the United States.

Mr. Alex Shepherd: If a person is a failed refugee claimant in the United States, why is he still in the United States?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: The Americans have similar problems to the rest of us. Even if someone has been determined to be inadmissible or not in need of protection, it's not always easy to remove them. They either disappear and go underground, or if you do find them or you do have them and you attempt to remove them, there may be difficulties in getting travel documents from the country to which you want to remove them. The country of which they are a national may not want to take them back. If they're a danger to the public, the airline may be loathe to carry them. There are a number of reasons we're unable to remove people.

Mr. Alex Shepherd: It seems an oddity that we may well be the refugee claimant's second country of choice, and we go through the whole process the Americans have already gone through.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: One of the things our current legislation and the new legislation will give us is the possibility of entering into agreements with countries on safe third countries. The safe third country concept is to try to prevent exactly the issue that you're describing, asylum shopping, where people who are seeking asylum will go from country to country. The safe third country would allow us to be able to return to the United States or any other country we enter into an agreement with a person who resided or sojourned in that country and had the opportunity to claim refugee status, knowing that they had the opportunity to claim protection in that country they first arrived in.

The legislation provides us with the tool. We need to have an agreement with the United States in order to do this. We cannot, unilaterally, just push people back across the border. One of the things we are looking at with the Americans, and we have started our discussion with them, is asylum seekers in Canada and the United States, because we both have the problem of people who come and claim refugee status. So there is the possibility of entering into a safe third country agreement with the United States.

The Chair: Okay, we'll go to Bev.

Ms. Desjarlais.

Mrs. Bev Desjarlais (Churchill, NDP): Following up on what you said about the process between the U.S. and Canada, they often will, I believe, simultaneously apply within the U.S. and Canada. Is that accurate?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: It does happen sometimes, and the pilot project I mentioned at Lacolle did identify a small proportion. In that particular pilot we didn't find large numbers who were hedging their bets and applying in both systems at the same time.

Mrs. Bev Desjarlais: I think we get 40% from the U.S. Do you know how many refugee claimants the U.S. gets from us?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: I don't have that information, and I don't know whether the Americans have it. Given the differences between our systems, the Americans have more people who claim refugee status once they've been apprehended in the United States, as opposed to claiming it on arrival. So it's a little more difficult for them to determine how many of their refugee claimants would have come from Canada.

Mrs. Bev Desjarlais: It would seem that if we had such a large percentage coming from the U.S., we could in essence just say, no, you can't come over, and really, what the heck can they do? Then it's up to the U.S. to look after them.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Part of what we're trying to do with the United States is build a constructive and collaborative relationship, obviously, on border security, and just pushing people back across the border unilaterally would not seem to meet that objective.

• 1625

Mrs. Bev Desjarlais: Well, you're not really pushing them across the border, because I believe what's happening now is that appointments are set up for refugee claimants to come across and do their documentation. So there's knowledge of who's going to come, and the appointment's being set up so that they can go through the process. They haven't appeared on the soil without the knowledge that they're coming. I recognize that there's a need for it to be a joint process, so it's not an in-your-face kind of approach to the Americans to keep all their refugee claimants.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: You're quite right. In Fort Erie in particular we have a situation where there is an NGO in upper New York state that assists persons who are seeking to claim refugee status in Canada.

Post-September 11 we did see some increase in the number of refugee claimants coming north, and at Fort Erie in particular we saw an increased number. Second, we started to do front-end security screening of refugee claimants, which is an important point. What we have done traditionally is, when an individual arrives and claims refugee status, fingerprint them, photograph them, and give them the documentation to complete and send to the Immigration and Refugee Board. We do a very preliminary assessment, and then we do a further eligibility determination later.

We haven't in the past done a full security screening of those claimants until after they've been through the process and the Immigration and Refugee Board has decided they are refugees, whereupon they proceed to obtain permanent residence. We have now started to do that intensive security screening when they arrive, which means that an officer is spending two to three hours interviewing a refugee claimant. They go through a very exhaustive list of questions. They ascertain where the person has lived, what organizations they belong to. They collect a great deal of information from the refugee claimant that doesn't relate to their claim for protection, because that is the job of the Immigration and Refugee Board, but deals in great detail with who they are, where they've been, and where they're coming from. It's taking a lot longer, obviously, to deal with each individual refugee claimant in a place like Fort Erie.

So as a very pragmatic measure, in order to be able to deal with that situation post-September 11 in Fort Erie, we decided to set up an arrangement with that NGO in upper New York state. Knowing the NGO was preparing people to come north, we simply said to that organization, work with us in sending people to us, rather than sending 40 people at a time who we cannot deal with. We don't have the capacity to deal with 40 refugee claimants all at once at Fort Erie, so can you send them to us five at a time or eight at a time or ten at a time? We can actually manage that flow, and we can schedule time with the examining officers and do this in a more realistic way.

Mrs. Bev Desjarlais: Thank you for that.

I actually toured that facility about 12 days ago and was extremely impressed. It gave me quite a different perception of the whole process. I was really pleased with it and what appears to be a good working relationship. So I wasn't really suggesting that we should act “in your face” with the Americans.

In regard to the papers, when people are coming in on the airlines and they show the airlines documents and they're accepted, is that what's called the pouching, where they have the documents and they are asked to surrender them?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Pouching is where the airline decides to “keep” the document, and normally it's given to the purser. The document can either be handed to the individual or, more likely, if we have a disembarkation team at the gate when they disembark, be provided to the immigration officers.

Mrs. Bev Desjarlais: If it's taken from that passenger, have there been any problems with passengers claiming that it wasn't their document after the fact or anything like that?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: I'm not aware of any particular situations where we've had that. What does happen, however—and this is why airlines are a little reticent to pouch—is that passengers sometimes get upset, particularly if they feel that they're being singled out, that the airline has asked them for their document and wants to keep their document over the course of the flight. There have been some difficulties. Airlines have reported that it sometimes causes problems with those passengers.

• 1630

Mrs. Bev Desjarlais: Is there some way of securing the document, leaving it with the passenger, but securing the document so that it can't be destroyed?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: I don't know that there is. I think, as we said before, technology may offer some solution to this problem, document scanning when people check in, for example, as part of obtaining advance passenger information. If we're able to obtain scanned versions of documents that are then transmitted to immigration at the disembarkation point of the plane, that may help us in trying to match the person with the document with the flight they arrived on.

Mrs. Bev Desjarlais: I know you mentioned that you're recommending that travellers to the U.S. carry passports. Is there any problem with those passengers who aren't taking passports right now either getting into the U.S. or getting back into Canada?

Ms. Kathryn McCallion: What happened historically was that if you phoned the passport office and asked whether you needed a passport to get into the United States, we said you didn't—we advise you to have one, but you don't need one. Since September 11, when people phone the passport office, we say, yes, you should probably have one. There have just been more checks, and I think we have a larger volume of people going for passports, but not as many travellers, and we have reason to believe it's mostly Canadians going to the United States, who feel more secure now having a passport. But to date there has been no change in the regulations, meaning you can still cross the border into the United States without a Canadian passport.

Mrs. Bev Desjarlais: I actually had a situation in my riding where a first nations person was coming back into Canada at one point and was given a rather hard time at the customs and immigration spot because they did not have a passport, but had their status cards. Have there been any instances of that type of situation? Would there be an insistence on having the passport?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Obviously, I can't speak to the particular situation that arose in that case, but the advice we generally are giving to people is, when you travel outside the country, even if it's only to the United States, travel with a passport or some other secure form of identity. Obviously, we have been on a heightened state of alert since September 11 at the borders, and we will continue to be vigilant, as we must be, in verifying people's documents when they come back.

Ms. Kathryn McCallion: Something that might be of interest to you on that particular question is all the efforts to have a good card. In addition to CIC and ourselves with the passport card, which is a pilot project, Indian and Northern Affairs is also looking at having a better card for status Indians, with the approval of the bands and their councils. It's still in the pilot project stage, but that will help over time as well.

Mrs. Bev Desjarlais: Thank you.

The Chair: Mr. Szabo.

Mr. Paul Szabo (Mississauga South, Lib.): Is anyone aware of a case where someone who came to our border and applied for refugee status subsequently hijacked an airplane or committed some other criminal offence in an airport related to airline or airport safety?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: If an individual who comes to Canada claims refugee status and subsequently is convicted of a serious criminal offence, their convention refugee status can be vacated.

Mr. Paul Szabo: The question is, are you aware of any specific case where someone who entered Canada as a refugee applicant subsequently hijacked a plane or perpetrated a crime related to airport safety?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: I don't know of any particular case.

Ms. Kathryn McCallion: You'd have to ask the RCMP.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: It happens that people come to Canada, claim refugee status, and subsequently commit crimes. That does happen.

Mr. Paul Szabo: But we're dealing here with airline and airport safety and security. We've spent an awful lot of time talking about refugees, linking it with airline and airport and security, and I don't know what the linkage is. We have no linkages whatsoever between Canada and the U.S. terrorist acts either, no proven links. So it bothers me that there still is this magnet about going after immigrants and refugees for being criminals. It's really interesting.

• 1635

When I come to an airport from an international destination, I enter Canada, and I have my passport etc., I encounter ICOs. They process a lot of people fairly quickly, but they, for me, represent an uncomfortable situation, maybe almost an intimidating situation. They seem to command a fair bit of attention and authority etc., much different from what I would encounter checking in for a domestic flight and going through the traditional screening. Can you tell me how much an average ICO makes, and what training or experience requirements or educational requirements there are?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: First, you may not be seeing an ICO as such, because in most of the international airports the airlines themselves hire people to do the document verification. They are either employees of the airline directly, or in some instances the airline may contract out to a security firm that does the documentation check at the gate.

Mr. Paul Szabo: Maybe I'm not clear. When I come off an international flight at Pearson Airport from Paris into Canada, I go up to this thing and it says Canada Immigration, and there's this guy there with all these people lined up, and we have to stand behind the yellow line and walk in. I thought these people were ICOs, but they're people employed by somebody. They're different.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: You're talking about the primary inspection line at Pearson, when you're going through Customs and Immigration, or you're talking about the persons who are standing at the gate as you get off the plane?

Mr. Paul Szabo: Just a moment. I'm going to start again.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Okay.

Mr. Paul Szabo: Paul Szabo, the member of Parliament, is in Paris. I hop on a plane and I arrive at Pearson. Before I can go and get my luggage, I have to go through a line past this guy in a little cube, stand behind the yellow line, and then walk up. That person asks me a couple of questions. How much does that person make, and what education and experience requirements do they have?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: That's a customs officer on the primary inspection line, who's employed by the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency. They're generally, I think, PM-2 level. I'm not sure what the salary level is of a PM-2. Customs officers, as I understand it, go through several weeks of training. In that six to nine to twelve weeks of training they spend about a week or so on the Immigration Act and regulations. I can't speak to what the rest of their training is, because that would be Canada Customs and Revenue Agency.

Mr. Paul Szabo: Okay. They're quite a bit different, though, from the people upstairs who screen you at any airport, when you're carrying on luggage and you go through the screening equipment etc.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: The people who screen your luggage have a very different mandate, obviously. They're screening the luggage and verifying that there's nothing that shouldn't be in the luggage as you go through the security check.

The people at the primary inspection line are administering a number of laws, not just the Immigration Act, but legislation for the Department of Agriculture, for the Department of Health, and obviously, the Customs Act as well. So they administer, on behalf of the federal government, a number of pieces of legislation at the border or at the port of entry.

Mr. Paul Szabo: There are many aspects to airline and airport safety and security. There are probably no less than a dozen different jurisdictions responsible to some extent, whether it be caterers, cargo, airlines, airport authorities, Canada Customs, Immigration—everybody there has some security element.

• 1640

If I had plans to do something nasty and I had a choice between Canada and the U.S., I would probably choose the one that would give me the best chance at being successful in doing what I wanted to do. First, is it desirable or necessary to have an integration or an umbrella under which all security- and safety-related responsibilities would fall, so that even though they may be seconded to different parties, somebody would be in charge? Is that something that is desirable? And if so, who might that be?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: That's an interesting question. I'm not sure I can answer it directly, because you're probably talking about machinery of government type issues.

Currently, at an airport, at a port of entry, as you rightly point out, there are a number of different agencies that are involved. From the perspective of Immigration, we rely on our Customs colleagues at the primary inspection line to weed out the ones who may be of some concern to us, and then we deal with them through secondary examination when they're referred from the primary inspection line. Other than that, we're dealing with the disembarkation teams that are at the gate.

As you say, Customs is there, RCMP is there, local law enforcement agencies are there. There are a number of different players. And I think what it speaks to is our need to be able to coordinate our efforts and ensure that we are collaborating and sharing our data and information. As Ms. McCallion pointed out, part of the effort we're engaged in right now across the federal government is to ensure that we are sharing all the relevant data with each other as expeditiously as we can, that we are working together in the airports to ensure that we're providing the best level of security we can.

The mandates are all different, and if you're asking me whether mandates should be changed, that's obviously not a question I can answer directly. But we are indeed, in the post-September 11 environment, as we were before too, trying to ensure that if there are gaps with the data we're sharing with each other, with the communication we have with each other, those gaps are being filled.

Mr. Paul Szabo: Okay.

Finally, when you have an international flight coming to Canada and people have documents when they get on the plane, some will have Canadian documents, some will have other passports, some will have visas, some will have who knows what. There is no place where anybody declares, when they get on the plane, what their intent is. So all of a sudden, it's surprise time. It's usually a surprise time, and I guess history shows you where the probabilities may lie in respect of occurrences.

I understand privacy and all this other stuff, but is there anything internationally, a standard or permission, whereby documents that were being presented could be scanned or photocopied or somehow recorded as to what was presented on there? That would be one thing.

The second aspect has to do basically with the passports. We have this nice long number that's on every passport. It seems to me that with bad credit cards, all the bad numbers are listed, and if you've tampered with it and changed the number, you would never know whether or not that number has been reassigned to somebody else or whatever. Is there anything we do with those numbers to deal with falsified or lost or stolen passports? I assume that if someone declares that it's lost or stolen, that number ought to be red-flagged, and anybody trying to use it should be caught. How does that system work, or does it work?

• 1645

Ms. Kathryn McCallion: In theory, it's perfect, but somebody has to read the extremely long list of stolen documents, ours or anyone's. I think that's what Ms. Atkinson is trying to say. There are data. We know which passports have been reported to us as missing, and the numbering system means we even know which blanks have gone missing, if any—and we've hardly ever had any missing. It's a series of numbers, of production runs, so you're identified by the number, but the blank passports are in numerical order too. But if we give a list to all the people in the alert, and there's a whole row of people coming by, not all people are told every passport must go through identification of all of the numbers on the list of any passports stolen in the last five years.

So it's a bit a combination, having the data in a format that people at the border can use at a speed that's acceptable to travellers, which is part of the process.

Mr. Paul Szabo: If you had my passport, could you check at the airport whether or not it's a valid passport or it's been stolen?

Ms. Kathryn McCallion: Not at the airport.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Not unless that information is on a lookout. With your regular, run-of-the-mill stolen passport, there are pages and pages, as Ms. McCallion has said, so all that information is not necessarily going to be dumped into a database. But those are the sorts of issues we're trying to deal with right now, looking at the interoperability of our systems, what sorts of data are missing in the data banks that are available to people at the border and people who are making decisions, what sorts of data can be provided, and how can they be provided in a useful way. That's part of our challenge.

Mr. Paul Szabo: Thank you.

The Chair: The chair is going to do another unusual thing. I've got two quick questions before I go to Mr. Forseth.

Can a Canadian citizen have two passports, for instance, a British passport and a Canadian passport, at the same time?

Ms. Kathryn McCallion: Yes, they can. It's called dual citizenship. All we can do is investigate that you are eligible to carry a Canadian passport, and we then issue you a passport. We do not comment on your eligibility to carry another passport, nor do we ask you to turn that one in, nor do we refuse you ours if you carry another one. So there are dual nationals in Canada or in other countries carrying at least two, if not sometimes three, passports.

The Chair: That answered my question. Mr. Forseth.

Mr. Paul Forseth: Perhaps I could just defer to Mr. Comuzzi—he had one quick question—before I begin.

Mr. Joe Comuzzi (Thunder Bay—Superior North, Lib.): Go ahead. I'm anxious to hear what you're going to ask—then I may not have to ask mine.

Mr. Paul Forseth: It's very interesting to see that in the primary, when they go to see a customs officer, they really have no quick system to know whether that passport is stolen, or even to know whether it's valid or whatever, other than looking at the person's body language or how good the document is. That passport is not passed over a reader or whatever, so the computer can do an immediate search to see whether that's a valid number or not. That's a very interesting admission. It doesn't make me feel very good.

We all want to do a better job, and you professionals in the system, especially from a management point of view, certainly know what the problems are, especially this whole problem that people get through primary screening and go out into the community, and five or six days later they show up at a downtown office and claim refugee status. Then the authorities have no way of tying them to a flight or a country of origin. We're really left in a quandary, because they may have been coached by that time or taken the time to prepare. If they say the r word, they have to be engaged in our system, and unless there's something very unusual, they're not going to be detained. That's the way the system works.

• 1650

So looking at that kind of problem, what is your list of management priorities, so that you are raising the standards, so that kind of thing isn't happening? Can you give us some of the results of your management reports when you review those kinds of things, as to where we're going, as to what we have to do to raise those standards, so those kinds of things are not going be happening in the future?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: You're right, people do arrive, and then five days or five weeks or five months later show up at an immigration office and claim refugee status, having no documents. The problem of undocumented people is a difficult one to deal with. The current immigration legislation gives us the authority to detain those whose identity we cannot determine at the port of entry only. The new Immigration Act will give us the authority to detain people whose identity we cannot determine inland, and this is a new and important tool for us, because it will allow us to use our detention powers tactically, to detain individuals who apply inland for refugee status and must have had documents when they got into the country in the first place, but have no documents when they get here.

The other thing we are doing, as I mentioned before, is a security screening up front, so that when an individual comes into an office and says, I want to claim refugee status, the first thing we do is sit them down and conduct a fairly intensive interview to try to determine who they are, where they came from, what organizations they belong to, who their parents were, what village they lived in, who they associate with, and so on. The individual is also required to fill out a form that goes through where they've lived for the last 10 years and so on.

All that information, together with the fingerprints and the photograph, then is sent to CSIS, and CSIS looks at that information, puts it through their database and their intelligence, and determines whether or not this may be an individual of concern. If that is an individual of concern to CSIS, in some instances CSIS will interview them and do some more in-depth examination and investigation of their background, and will, eventually, provide us with information that will allow us either to determine that they are okay and eligible to claim refugee status, whereupon they go through the system, or to determine that they are ineligible to claim refugee status, because they are a serious criminal, they're a war criminal, they're a member of organized crime, they're a terrorist, or they're a security threat. A third possibility is that if the security threat is serious enough, CSIS can provide us with evidence that would compel the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and the Solicitor General to seek a security certificate under the Immigration Act.

When a security certificate is sought, the two ministers present evidence to a Federal Court judge. The Federal Court judge determines whether that evidence is reasonable and whether the issuance of a security certificate is reasonable on the basis of that information. The individual is not party to that hearing in front of the Federal Court judge, it is held in camera, so that the information we have from CSIS can be protected. The individual is given a summary of the grounds upon which a security certificate is issued. When we have a security certificate, we can arrest without warrant, we can detain, and we can deport.

So those tools are all available to us, and the new powers to detain in-land will be available to us with the new Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. Any streamlined security certificate process will also be available to us with the new Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

Mr. Paul Forseth: That's it for raising the standards? What you've described are the technicalities of the way it's been, with a hope for a few more powers with Bill C-11. But I'm talking about basically raising the standards. As a manager, have you not really looked at a list of priorities: these are the actions we've got to take to make this theoretical system work in fact? Because the failure rates are not very good.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: There are a number of other things we are looking at. We go back to the notion that there are a number of ways to screen people before they arrive at your border or before they arrive in Canada, and we start with the visa screen. We find that visitor visas can be a very effective way of screening out people who would want to abuse your system or who may pose a security threat. So one of the things we are looking at is our visitor visa screen: have we got the right countries on our list of countries that require visas?

• 1655

Second, through our immigration control officer network do we need to do more in interdiction and working with the airlines to interdict those people who get on planes with fraudulent documents, or with legitimate documents, but arrive in Canada without any documents?

Then, when people arrive, we get into the front-end security screening and these other tools I discussed.

The safe third country agreement is another tool, dealing with people who arrive, who resided or sojourned in the United States, who could have claimed refugee status in the United States, but did not, entering into discussions with the Americans to examine the possibility of having agreement with them, so that we can return people who had the opportunity to claim protection in the United States and did not.

So you're quite right, there are a series of measures, some legislative, some administrative, that we are looking at as a holistic approach to the issue.

Mr. Paul Forseth: You're looking at them, but are you saying the safe third country bilateral agreement with the United States is really on and the government is really pushing that? And are you also really pushing so that the list of countries that require visas is going to become parallel to that of the United States? Are we as a country going to join together, stand shoulder to shoulder, as we say, about this visa requirement for countries? Are those two major management priorities you're saying you're proceeding with?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: They're obviously priorities for us. With the visa list, we always talk about convergence, which does not mean that we're going to necessarily have exactly the same list as the Americans. We have agreed with the Americans that we should sit down and review the respective countries where we don't require visas. The objective here is not necessarily to have exactly the same list as the Americans. There will undoubtedly be differences, where we will not want to impose a visa where the Americans have a visa, and vice versa. To the extent that we can bring those two lists closer and understand where the problems are for each other and take mitigating measures to deal with them, that's where we want to go.

The Chair: Thank you.

Mr. Comuzzi.

Mr. Joe Comuzzi: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I don't want to talk about immigrants, I don't want to talk about visas, I don't want to talk about refugees, I want to talk about Canadians.

It's obvious that our system was a little weak prior to the operative date, but there was no reason to try to fortify it. There are huge amounts of proof to that effect. We've been issuing passports to Canadian citizens in the same form for I don't know how long—a long time. Basically, we may change the colour or something, but.... I'm not trying to oversimplify. I'm alluding to what Mr. Szabo was getting to, that we seem, in your division, to keep doing the very same thing we're trying to correct at the bridges, getting our goods across into the United States or the American goods into Canada. We are spending all our time on screening everybody, and we're not isolating the resources we have to screen those cases that may cause a problem. So, that's the first element on which I base my question.

You're in charge of programs and policy. Have you ever talked to the people in visa or master card about how they run their system? I can go anywhere in the world and get money. You put in a card, zip, zip, zip, and you've got money. That's got to be a hell of a security system. They've got some security things in that system that are unbelievably sound. I don't want to be simplistic, and I hope Ms. McCallion doesn't think this is too insignificant, but have we ever talked to these people, the people who devised the system for these companies?

• 1700

Ms. Joan Atkinson: We're always looking for ways in which we can improve our processes, because—

Mr. Joe Comuzzi: No. Have we ever talked to the people who developed the systems for those credit cards that are absolutely secure? They have all the facilities? If you're missing a card, you call a number and they put you on a screen. If you pass across and do business at a certain location six times a day, you've got a history. If you want to go back two years and find out where you were, you've got a history. Every time you cross a border, do something, you have a history. They have a tremendous information gathering network. I don't see where that compromises personal liberties.

I'm asking you as a policy adviser for the Government of Canada, have you ever talked to the people who developed that system to see if there is applicability for Canadian citizens, in order to ease the flow of traffic into, primarily, the United States? To get to Mr. Szabo's point, you come into an airport, you're a Canadian citizen, you don't have any history, you're not smuggling, and you go through a place, put your card in, and away you go. That seems to me so simple, yet so workable. Have we ever developed it?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Have we talked to people who produce smart cards and have pre-enrolments? Yes. Do we have that system? Yes, we have it for the CANPASS.

Mr. Joe Comuzzi: Yes, I know that.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: We also have it for a pilot project we've done with the Americans called NEXUS at Sarnia-Port Huron, where there is pre-enrolment. You apply for it, you get a card you can show or swipe through, and you gain entry.

Mr. Joe Comuzzi: Why don't we implement it?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Well, that's a very good question. On September 11 we suspended—

Mr. Joe Comuzzi: I know, we suspended that.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: —all of those facilitation programs, because of the heightened level of security.

Mr. Joe Comuzzi: But isn't it time to get some of those back up and running?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: We are indeed working towards getting those programs up and running with the Americans, particularly the NEXUS program, because it is a joint program with the Americans. My customs counterparts and myself have both been talking to the Americans about getting NEXUS up and running, and in fact, to look at how we can expand NEXUS to other ports of entry. We think that does provide what you're talking about here, the ability to pre-enrol, get a smart card, and be able to swipe your card through a reader as you go into the country, so that you don't have to be examined, dealing with low-risk travellers in that way.

We are, in addition, looking at a similar sort of program for airports, not just at land borders. We're also, again in partnership with Customs, looking at being able to provide a smart card for travellers through airports, a similar sort of situation, where you pre-enrol, we verify your background, we ensure that you're no problem, and we give you a smart card.

One of the things the Americans are actively pursuing, and obviously we are with them, is looking at the use of a biometric with those smart cards, determining whether we should be using this, what would be the best biometric to use, how much it costs, and all those things. Those are all part of our discussions right now to try to expand the NEXUS concept beyond where it is now.

Ms. Kathryn McCallion: The passport office, CIC, and CCRA were partners—

Mr. Joe Comuzzi: I don't know what those words mean.

Ms. Kathryn McCallion: The passport office—

Mr. Joe Comuzzi: I know what that means. What does CIC and so on—

Ms. Kathryn McCallion: —Citizenship and Immigration Canada, where my colleague is from, and Canada Customs and Revenue Agency were in partnership on the smart card issue about five years ago. The demands of each department are different. But one of the difficulties from the passport office's perspective is that we need to know the bearer of the card at the border is the person to whom the card was issued. If I steal your bank card from you and I get your PIN number, I can get money from your account globally, because the PIN number is supposed to be your identification. There isn't a system like that at the moment acceptable to the passport office. What we need to find is a biometric embedded in the card that says, when you cross the border, we actually issued you that card and that's who you are, not that the card is eligible.

• 1705

Mr. Joe Comuzzi: With NEXUS, you have some unanimity of thought between Canada and the United States. Am I correct on that? They think it's a pretty good program. You've got to adopt a program that's acceptable to both countries.

We've got people waiting at the borders for two or three hours to get across. We just can't sit on the deal, Mr. Chairman, we've got to speed it up, we've got to get moving. This committee, Mr. Chairman, sat on open skies for 8 or 9 years, until we decided we were going to take a chance. We finally decided we were going to take a chance. We didn't have everything perfect, but we took a chance. We can't wait. There are goods sitting at borders that we can't get across to the United States or can't bring into the country. There are people working across the border. Ms. Whelan has 2,600 nurses across the border every day, and they can't get across in an hour and a half. It's nice to go through the process, it's nice to make sure we do the proper research, but we have researched this, and we've got to start to move.

My question to you is, when are we going to start to put these things into action? We cannot wait, Mr. Chairman. That's my question, Mr. Chairman. When are we going to start to implement these things and stop talking about them?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: I agree that there is a sense of urgency about keeping the movement of people and goods across the border flowing. We're moving this forward as quickly as we can. We're giving it the utmost priority and looking at the NEXUS and the CANPASS group of facilitation programs. I can assure you that we are talking with senior levels in the American government to try to resolve whatever the difficulties and concerns may be on the American side, to see if we can't move this forward as quickly as we can. There is definitely a desire on the part of the Government of Canada to be able to move forward with these facilitation programs, but we must do it in conjunction with the Americans, that's obviously crucial, to be able to implement the NEXUS programs more broadly. If Customs were here, I'm sure they would tell you the same thing, that we're working very diligently with the Americans to try to push forward with getting these facilitation programs up and running.

Perhaps I could just add one other thing. It's important to move forward with those programs, but there are other things that we need to be looking at at the same time. I think you put your finger on it when you said we should be focusing our resources on the high-risk travellers, on the ones who are going to cause us the most concern, rather than spending our resources on the low-risk travellers.

So there's a two-part strategy here. It's trying to deal with the low-risk travellers as efficiently as we can, knowing that these people are not a problem, while at the same time having the systems in place to identify the high-risk travellers, so that we can devote our resources to dealing with those people, rather than the vast majority of low-risk travellers, who we can facilitate through some other way. It's a combination of strategies we're looking at here.

Mr. Joe Comuzzi: I have a final question.

We deal with the Americans. We had them here last week, whatever group it was. I'm talking about the parliamentarians. They are as anxious to get this fixed as we are. It seems to me there's a delay, for whatever reason. When you get the members who are elected by their constituents wanting to move on this, what is the hold-up? NEXUS is acceptable to them. It went through the experimental thing, and it stopped on the 11th. It's not going to be perfect, Ms. Atkinson, you know that as well as I do, but it's going to get perfected as we go along. We've got to get you folks at the decision-making level to move. I can't impress upon you enough that you've got to get down and get the thing moving. We can't move it. We can tell you that we approve what you're doing, but we have to get you folks meeting and moving on fixing this monumental problem for the health of our economy. We've just got to get it done. We can't sit on it.

• 1710

That's all, Mr. Chairman. I just can't impress upon you enough that you'll have the support, I would suspect, of all parliamentarians, but we have to get it going. That's all I have to say. I can't impress upon you enough that we can't sit on it any longer.

The Chair: Thank you.

Paul.

Mr. Paul Forseth: Administrators would like to get on with it too, but it's an issue of Treasury Board and a decision of cabinet to get on these things. I encourage the Liberal side to do what they can through their informal network or whatever to make the case, because what you're talking about, basically, is a political judgment, which is a cabinet thing and a Treasury Board thing.

Mr. Joe Comuzzi: I can guarantee that has the highest of priorities.

Mr. Paul Forseth: Well, I have a question that goes to the minister, and the minister says things are a high priority, and then it takes a while to deliver. But I agree with you, NEXUS would seem to be the way to go. When I went looking at cross-border points and talking to the American authorities, on both the east and west coasts, that seemed to be the formula, but whatever that labyrinthine decision-making process is, getting on with it is something cabinet and Treasury Board have got to solve. The will is in the ministry at the lower levels to do it.

The Chair: Okay, I appreciate you guys, but one of the things I don't like with my meetings is that you forget me, we start a two-way thing, and then everybody sort of gets distracted. I know Paul thinks that should happen, but I think we need to keep the meeting on track.

You're both right. There are two parts of this. There is the bureaucracy and there is the political arm, and I think both parties are saying, just get this thing moving.

Bev, do have some more questions?

Mrs. Bev Desjarlais: I was going to ask if I could give you a whole bunch of little questions, because I had them all written down and I forget to ask you some.

When talking about airline security, you were saying the airlines contract out to security firms the review of the documentation, which I assume to be visas, passports, or whatever they're coming with. I would like you to clarify that further.

Second, I'd like your comments on the carrying of sidearms by immigration officers, because it has come up.

As well, how many lost passports do you have, roughly, on a yearly basis?

When I was at Fort Erie, I found that one of the concerns out there—I know this isn't dealing with refugees, but I think the same thing applies when we're following through on the security process—is the number of interpreters for the refugees who are coming through. There's a grave need in some areas—the one they said was the most urgent was Portuguese, which I found absolutely incredible. As a result of the pay the interpreters get, it's very hard to keep interpreters and to arrange proper interpretation for the centres.

As well, I believe CSIS now has a site at the Fort Erie centre, which they didn't before, so that if there is some concern over a particular individual, they're able to get the CSIS officer to pull up that information. I'm wondering if the plan is to maintain a CSIS operator there in the long term and whether that is in place in the airports as well.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Okay, let me start.

• 1715

Given that airlines have the responsibility to verify that passengers getting on their planes are properly documented, some airlines will contract out that particular function to security companies. In many locations you have companies that specialize in this line of work, because we are not the only country in the world that imposes these sorts of obligations on the airlines. In fact, most countries place these sorts of obligations on the airlines. You will find in a hub like London that there is more than one company that specializes in document verification for airlines. The airlines subcontract that particular function they're required to perform to these companies.

Mrs. Bev Desjarlais: Would that be done prior to getting your ticket?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: It's most often done at the gate by these particular companies. When you check in with your luggage and show your ticket to the ticket agent, there's a first verification of the document and the person, and the ticket agent determines whether or not it looks like a legitimate document and you've got the right document to get on the plane. When you get to the gate to get on the plane, there is another document verification. Not all airlines do it that way in all airports, but with those airlines that hire a security company to do the documentation check, that's where you find those people most often, at the gate.

As for sidearms for immigration officers, we have for some time had a policy on the use of force. We like to call it the officer disengagement policy, because it is very much a policy that attempts to position an officer who may be placed at risk and looks at what is the appropriate response for that particular officer. Our enforcement officers in-land are all required to undergo officer disengagement training.

The purpose of that training is to try to ensure that the officer does not have to use force in dealing with a particular situation. The whole focus of the training is to give the officer the appropriate tools to deal with a difficult situation, a potentially explosive situation, and try to calm down the other person who may be involved in that situation, try to disengage, so that they don't have to resort to using force. However, in case the use of force is the only option that is available to the officer, the training goes in gradations from trying to calm a person down to using the equipment we do provide to them, batons and pepper spray. Any officer who is empowered to carry that equipment must go through this training. It is the same training that is provided to police officers. They must undergo recertification, undergo retraining every two years to ensure that they still have the capability to use the equipment when it is needed.

We have recently issued a policy on officer disengagement at ports of entry. We did a risk assessment of the situation at ports of entry, and it was our assessment that it was not necessary for officers to have all the protective gear and the equipment at ports of entry. They are empowered to arrest people at ports of entry; they have handcuffs, and they must be trained on how to use the handcuffs. They get the same training as those who are issued with the equipment in how to deal with a potentially explosive situation. They are given training on how to use the handcuffs, how to arrest someone, how to use the handcuffs appropriately, and so on.

If the manager determines that the officers at a particular port of entry are facing a dangerous situation that warrants the equipment, flak jacket, pepper spray, and baton, then the manager can instruct his officers to gear up in that equipment—but only if, in the manager's determination, there is a dangerous situation and a risk. If the officer is required to leave the port of entry facility and pursue someone, for example, that has attempted to flee, though the first recourse is to call the RCMP to deal with that situation, you're required to put that equipment on.

• 1720

It's always a balance in regard to the particular situation. We do a risk assessment. We are encouraging all our officers at the ports of entry to report to headquarters any incidents where they felt they were being threatened or in a dangerous situation. We constantly review our risk assessment, and if a situation arises at a port where we feel that the situation is dangerous or there is a high enough level of risk, we will, obviously, instruct officers to wear the equipment and take all the appropriate precautions.

As to lack of interpreters for the refugee claimants, I hadn't heard the specifics about Portuguese—I agree, it's interesting. We do try to work with the local NGO community to set up a system where we can call upon them to assist us, particularly if we have large numbers of arrivals, and I think at Fort Erie you've seen that. I can't comment specifically on where our interpreters may be lacking, but clearly, that's an issue we need to take seriously, because if we don't have proper interpretation, individuals are not necessarily going to get a fair hearing and a fair assessment. So I've taken note of that.

CSIS have been absolutely magnificent in their cooperation with us, since September 11. They have come and helped us out at Fort Erie, Pearson, and some of our other centres where we get large numbers of people arriving, to do interviews on the spot when we're dealing with individuals who may be of concern. We are talking to CSIS about the possibility of continuing to have CSIS presence at some of our larger centres, because we have found it absolutely invaluable.

The Chair: I have a quick one, and it probably doesn't relate much to security.

With the fact that now a lot of people will be needing passports, we have a lot of older people who came over to Canada as war brides or what have you, and they're not even citizens, they forgot to take out their citizenship. Is there a fast track or a process to give them their passports without their going through all the tests and different things?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Well, they would need to apply for citizenship before they could get a Canadian passport. I don't think there's any way round that.

The Chair: How fast is that process in these particular cases? These people have obviously been here for quite a while, and they just never got around to doing it.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: I think with individuals like that who have been here for a long time, those should be reasonably straightforward applications for citizenship and should not take a long period of time, in that they obviously meet the language requirements, they probably will not need to be seen by a citizenship judge to assess their language skills or their knowledge of Canada. Those are the sorts of cases we should be able to deal with in a matter of months, but it does take months to deal with a citizenship application, not weeks.

The Chair: Do they have to do that test as well?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: They do. Every citizenship applicant does need to do that test, yes.

The Chair: Okay. Thank you very much for coming. Your—

Mr. Joe Comuzzi: Mr. Chairman, since it is so important to get the flow of people back and forth into the U.S. and Canada, I wonder if it would be in order, if these folks are the ones responsible for implementing the flow, to bring them back as soon as we return after the Christmas break for a progress report on how we're doing.

The Chair: I think we have the message. It's up to the committee whether they want to do that.

Mr. Joe Comuzzi: We have to stay on top of this.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: I would suggest, Mr. Chairman, that you might want to have Customs as well, because they're our partners at the border.

The Chair: Okay. Thank you very much. We appreciate your input, it was very informative.

We're adjourned until 3:30 tomorrow.