CIMM Committee Meeting

37th PARLIAMENT, 2nd SESSION

Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration

EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Thursday, October 2, 2003

¹

1530

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral (Laval Centre, BQ))

Ms. Tamra Thomson (Director, Legislation and Law Reform, Canadian Bar Association)

Ms. Wendy Danson (Vice Chair, National Citizenship and Immigration Law Section, Canadian Bar Association)

¹

1535

¹

1540

¹

1545

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral)

Ms. Tamra Thomson

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral)

¹

1550

Mr. John O'Reilly (Haliburton—Victoria—Brock, Lib.)

Ms. Wendy Danson

¹

1555

Mr. John O'Reilly

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral)

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy (Calgary—Nose Hill, Canadian Alliance)

º

1600

Ms. Wendy Danson

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy

º

1605

Ms. Wendy Danson

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral)

Ms. Tamra Thomson

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral)

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron (Verchères—Les-Patriotes)

º

1610

Ms. Wendy Danson

º

1615

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron

Ms. Wendy Danson

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron

º

1620

Ms. Wendy Danson

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron

Ms. Wendy Danson

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron

Ms. Wendy Danson

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron

Ms. Wendy Danson

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral)

Mr. Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre, NDP)

º

1625

Ms. Wendy Danson

º

1630

Mr. Pat Martin

Ms. Wendy Danson

Mr. Pat Martin

º

1635

Ms. Wendy Danson

Mr. Pat Martin

Ms. Wendy Danson

Mr. Pat Martin

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral)

Mr. Massimo Pacetti (Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, Lib.)

º

1640

Ms. Wendy Danson

Mr. Massimo Pacetti

Ms. Wendy Danson

Mr. Massimo Pacetti

Ms. Wendy Danson

Mr. Massimo Pacetti

Ms. Wendy Danson

º

1645

Mr. Massimo Pacetti

Ms. Wendy Danson

Mr. Massimo Pacetti

Ms. Wendy Danson

Mr. Massimo Pacetti

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral)

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy

º

1650

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy

Mr. Stéphane Bergeron

º

1655

Ms. Wendy Danson

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral)

Ms. Wendy Danson

»

1700

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral)

---

CANADA

Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration

---

NUMBER 075

l

2nd SESSION

l

37th PARLIAMENT

---

EVIDENCE

Thursday, October 2, 2003

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

¹  (1530)  

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral (Laval Centre, BQ)): Honourable colleagues and representatives of the Canadian Bar Association, thank you for being here this afternoon. We have two hours to ask you questions about the proposed identity card.

    As you no doubt know, almost a year ago, Minister Coderre suggested that it might be a good idea for Canada to have a national identity card. The committee was mandated to hear from witnesses and to gather information and data. We are still in the process of doing that and we have yet to come to any kind of decision. That will happen once we have heard from all stakeholders, and notably from witnesses like the Canadian Bar Association.

    Welcome to both of you. Thank you for submitting a bilingual brief. It makes my job that much easier. You have the floor.

[English]

    Ms. Tamra Thomson (Director, Legislation and Law Reform, Canadian Bar Association): Merci, madame la présidente.

    The Canadian Bar Association is a national association that represents approximately 38,000 jurists from across Canada, and among our primary objectives are improvement in the law and working toward improvement in the administration of justice. It is in that optic that we have presented to you the written submission you have before you in which we make our remarks today.

    I should say that the submission you have was the work of the collaboration of a number of groups within the CBA. These include the citizenship and immigration law section, the national criminal justice section, the constitutional and human rights law section, the privacy law section, among individuals from other groups. In that range of groups you can imagine that they bring quite different perspectives to the question of national identity cards, but I must say that they came to unanimous views on the positions that are being presented to you today.

    I am pleased to have with me Wendy Danson, who's a lawyer from Edmonton and the vice-chair of our citizenship and immigration law section. I will ask her to make opening remarks and then we will be pleased to answer your questions.

    Ms. Wendy Danson (Vice Chair, National Citizenship and Immigration Law Section, Canadian Bar Association):

    Good afternoon.

    We were originally asked to come here and talk about the national identity card and we will do that, but we are quite concerned about what appears to us to be a fundamental shift in government policy when we start talking about a national identity program. For this reason, we would like to back up a little bit and go back a few steps and look at the issue from a different perspective.

    Having said that, we would submit that the obligation of this committee is twofold. In the first instance it's to develop a national identity policy, to discuss the purposes, the principles, and the goals that go into a national identity policy, and then secondarily, and only secondarily, to look at the processes for implementing that policy.

    The national identity card that's being bandied around is an implementation tool, we submit, and it's very difficult to discuss the card itself without having a policy framework within which it fits. We, from the CBA, submit that it would be your role as parliamentarians to provide the leadership in the development of that policy. And once that policy is established, after thorough and thoughtful debate, then the various alternatives for implementing the policy, the various technologies available to implement the objectives of that policy, would be addressed. At the moment, we feel there has not been enough discussion about why we need this policy, why we ought to have this policy, when it should be applied, for whom it should be applied, and those questions, we suggest, need to be answered prior to the implementation issues beings addressed.

    There's no doubt that technology is part of the issue, that biometrics is part of the issue, that a national identity card is part of the issue. We don't doubt that we're in the middle of an information technology era where the advancements over minimally the last 20 years have gone faster than any of us would ever have predicted. But we also believe they're developing faster than we have been able to deal with the ethical and policy issues that actually drive the development of technology.

    We see the national identity card as a tool; we see the combination of biometrics as a tool. They may well have a place in this discussion, they may well have a place in our society, but these tools are not independent of our social mores, our customs, our culture, and our laws. For this reason, we submit that the committee should propose a sound public national identification policy before we debate the tools to implement it.

    In that regard, we suggest that your committee urge that the brakes be put on what seems to be a very hurried debate on a national identity card with biometrics. We feel it is your leadership that can provide a slowing down, somewhat, of the process in order to allow us the opportunity to establish the purposes and the principles for which it might become useful. In our brief, in our presentation, we have suggested that a white paper be developed to set this out, and it may be that this is the end result of what your committee does.

¹  (1535)  

    In looking at the purposes of what a national identification policy may do, we need to address what it is we need it for. Why do we need a national identification scheme? In law we refer to it as, what is the mischief we're trying to curtail by implementing a new policy, especially one that appears to be limiting certain liberties and freedoms that Canadians have always enjoyed? That has not as yet been concretely determined.

    We have heard it's for security concerns, but that's a big word with many different meanings. We have heard that maybe it's for national purposes, to assist on a federal basis. We have heard that maybe the provinces will opt into it. But if a policy is to be developed, those purposes actually must be identified. We also submit that those purposes must be very specific and very limited.

    I began by saying that this is a fundamental shift in Canadian public policy, and that is further invasion into privacy rights of Canadians. If that is to occur, then we submit it must be done in a very limited sense and in a very specific sense.

    We also believe that any policy must be founded on certain basic principles, and the fundamental principle that we believe must be front and centre of any national identification policy is a deference for the Canadian tradition of respect for, and protection of, the individual rights of Canadians. That is the corollary of minimal government intervention.

    We recognize that there are international and national obligations that must be addressed in meeting a policy, but we submit they must be identified and they must be disclosed. At the moment we don't exactly know what they are; it's more or less left to innuendo.

    Another principle that must found this policy is that it must be secure, and secure in two ways. One, it must be secure from fraud, that is, from being replicated, duplicated, or fraudulently reproduced; and two, it must be secure from theft, whether that theft is accidental or purposeful by those who have access to it.

    Another principle that we feel is very important to the foundation of this policy is that it must be Canadian in design and Canadian in purpose. It should be something that we develop for ourselves as Canadians that meets our needs, and we shouldn't be forced by international pressures to adopt the policy to meet what other countries might want us to meet.

    Having said that about the purposes and principles, I will go briefly into some of the technology, some of the tools that might be used for implementing such a policy.

    There are different forms of identity cards, different systems that could be adopted, but once the purposes and principles are set out, then one can balance the kind of implementation scheme that is required to meet those purposes. So we could have a system whereby we have a national identity card. We could have a system whereby we might want to upgrade our passports to meet the goals. We may have a need to upgrade our social insurance cards. It depends on what our goals and purposes are and it depends on where we've committed ourselves to a principle of minimal invasion of privacy. If so, then we can look at those various alternatives to meet that.

¹  (1540)  

    I comment that technology is not magic; it's something that in itself has been developed by humans, and just as humans have, and will always have, frailties, so will technology. As soon as you have one individual who is able to develop a very sophisticated technology such as biometrics, we will always see other individuals with the same brilliance, the same intelligence, who are able to break that. It's something that we should accept as just a fact. It is possible, however, to ensure that there is minimal break in security, and that is what we should be striving for.

    Another key issue in the implementation that will have to be addressed is whether it is mandatory or not. It seems to us that if it's to meet policy goals it will have to...we don't know what those goals are yet, but it is likely that in order to meet them it will have to be mandatory. If it's something as simple as a requirement to enter into, for example, the United States on travel, maybe that could be simply met by a travel card, but the scope of the discussion that has gone on to date would lend itself to a consideration that there's certainly a consideration that it be mandatory. That needs to be clarified.

    How much embedded information would be contained in a national identity document, and would that information be limited to what is on the card itself or would it be linked into databases that give access to other confidential information, and is that what we want? Those are serious issues that need to be addressed first from a policy perspective and secondly from an implementation one.

    Who can access this data? Who can demand it? Will it be used in fields that the policy itself does not expect it to be? I had to chuckle on my way in when I was using my Alberta driver's licence to come into the House today. I would never have thought--and probably my government would never have thought--that this would be a purpose for which my Alberta driver's licence would be used. Similarly, if we're starting to carry national identity documents, is it possible that they will be used and accessed by groups, organizations, and private individuals that we don't even think of at the moment?

    How will the application process be handled? What kind of questioning will we require in order to get a card? What happens if we don't apply for it? Will there be enforcement proceedings? Will people become criminals because they are no longer carrying an identity card that is a mandatory card? What happens to the information when we die? Does it die with us? Does it disappear? Those are some of the considerations that will come when the discussion of an implementation occurs.

    Finally, the cost factor. It is something that is being discussed in other forums, but we raise it again too. A cost-benefit analysis must occur when one implements a new policy, and we have some other precedents we can look at. I know the permanent resident card is being applied to only a limited set of people at the moment in Canada, but it does provide a good example of a requirement to carry a card and the process that the government has to go through in order to implement this.

    By way of summary, we submit that the national identity system is actually a method of state control of its citizens; it's a method for the government to be able to control certain elements of its population for certain purposes. The Canadian tradition has always been to minimally intrude on the rights of its citizens and others, and before we make this critical shift or even adopt a new Canadian policy, we must flesh out its purposes and objectives, establish them on the basis of sound principles of commitment to privacy, look at the impact of the available technology that is there to meet those purposes, and assess the cost, both in terms of the financial implications and the consequences in terms of what we give up when we take on a national policy of this scope.

¹  (1545)  

    It is a dramatic shift in direction. We say in our brief, and I repeat it again here, that privacy lies at the heart of liberty in our modern democracy. Let's not be hasty to infringe upon that privacy, that liberty, or our democracy.

    Thank you.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral): Thank you, Madam.

    Is there anything you wish to add, Ms. Thomson?

    Ms. Tamra Thomson: Thank you, no.

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral): Thank you very much then for your presentation. You've outlined to us the views of those who work in the legal and justice fields. Naturally, we agree with you that much work remains to be done on this issue and I wholeheartedly concur that a quick decision at this time would not be justifiable. As you so aptly stated, the committee is still gathering data and no working paper has yet been produced.

    I glanced at your submission quickly and noted that you talk about a white paper. We are nowhere near releasing a white paper.

    I'm wondering if Mr. Bryden has a question.

¹  (1550)  

[English]

    He doesn't listen to me. I'm not happy with you, honey.

[Translation]

    Go ahead, Mr. O'Reilly.

[English]

    Mr. John O'Reilly (Haliburton—Victoria—Brock, Lib.): Merci, Madam Chair.

    Thank you very much for the presentation.

    I suppose what we're all doing here is asking each other the same questions. I think the questions you're asking in your presentation are the same questions we're asking of witnesses, whether their field of expertise is biometrics, or whether they're from the Law Society, or some of the witnesses we've heard, such as privacy commissioners and so forth.

    It would appear as though many countries are moving towards a national identity card. For instance, there's the European Union, where they're taking down various borders. I use Belgium and France as an example; you can drive right across and there's no checkpoint. But if you're from France and you ask for services in Belgium, you have to produce a card that shows what your country of origin is and where the services then are to be billed.

    So I suppose as we gear to a borderless society in the European Union and we try to have direct access to the United States, there may in fact be a purpose underlying this that would indicate that we do need something beyond the 54% of Canadians who have a passport. I suppose the time will come very shortly when we won't be able to travel to the United States without a passport, if that isn't happening right now. Our passports are all being upgraded with biometrics, embedded pictures, holograms, and various security features as they're going along. But the passports are a five-year identity, so there's a lag there. I suppose something along the lines of the maple leaf card, whereby people who have recently become citizens have a maple leaf card...they consider that a national ID card, and other people don't have one.

    So from the evidence we have heard and in the places we visited in the countries the committee travelled to in order to look at other ID cards, it seems that most countries of the world are going to some form of permanent ID card. Even your Alberta licence is in fact a picture licence with embedded information on it that has information that the Ontario and Quebec licences don't have; already they're upgraded. In fact, in Alberta you can go to the licence bureau and get a card that is a non-driver's licence from that institution, if you don't have some type of identity card.

    I think as we all ask the same questions as to what the purpose is.... The committee is studying that and asking those questions, and I don't think the committee has come to any particular conclusions. Some of us are totally against the card, and some see it coming whether we like it or not. I suppose Mr. Martin and I might agree on one thing in particular, and that is that we don't particularly like the card or the purpose of it.

    Anyway, I'll ask you to comment on that.

    Ms. Wendy Danson: I have several comments I might make in reply.

    I think the question is, do we need a national document, or a unified document, to cover us nationally for all purposes? That's where the danger comes in, we would submit. If you're trying to capture on one card a person's driving profile, a person's requirements for international travel, a person's requirements for health care, a person's requirements for identification, that's where the danger comes in. Trying to link together a lot of personal information about an individual in one spot, or having it accessible in one spot--that we see as a danger.

    But let me back up. We have said that these purposes need to be identified. Right now we see the requests coming from the federal government, or certainly Minister Coderre has said he's presenting it on behalf of the government. We don't see, at least I didn't understand, that the different provinces were opting into this and pushing for it as well. If it's for travel purposes, if it's a requirement to travel between Canada and the U.S., 31 million of us aren't doing that on a regular enough basis that it would require, I would submit, not only the expense but the intrusion of the infrastructure to put together a travel document. Maybe there is a way it can be done.

    Right now we're in the good situation of not being required to produce a visa to go into the United States. I think any Canadian you would talk to would like to remain in that position. The United States has come out clearly and said, if you do, then start putting some machine-readable passports and biometric identifiers on that passport. We do already have a machine-readable passport. CBA is not saying it is opposed to biometric technology going into that passport or into any other card; we're just saying that it must be specific to the very purpose it's trying to meet, and limited to that information.

    I hope I've answered your question.

¹  (1555)  

    Mr. John O'Reilly: Thank you. Merci, mademoiselle.

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral): Madame Ablonczy.

    Mrs. Diane Ablonczy (Calgary—Nose Hill, Canadian Alliance): Thank you, Madam Chair.

    Thank you for an extremely lucid, well-reasoned, and clear presentation, as one would have expected from eminent counsel and people who have studied this extensively.

    You say privacy lies at the heart of liberty, and I definitely agree. One way I put it is that knowledge is power, and the more knowledge I have about you, the more power I have over you. So we want to give that power away very carefully.

    You say what we have here is a solution in search of a problem. That's one of the frustrations we've had. The minister appeared before the committee and said something about there being a problem with identity theft and there being heightened security concerns, and so he wanted us to study a national ID card, but he gave absolutely no inkling, really, of what he was proposing or why he was proposing it, or what evil he hoped to vanquish with this card. So that has been a real problem for us.

    You've also mentioned with respect to privacy that it is an issue if someone gets your driver's licence, your Visa card, or your passport. They have a gold nugget there to exploit. But if they get a national identity card into which is tied every detail of your life, including your credit history and your financial transactions, your medical history, and all those things, they have a veritable gold mine. So again, before we try to create such a beast, we'd better think very carefully.

    You mentioned that technology is a tool for public policy; it shouldn't be driving public policy. You also mentioned that responsible public policy-makers should not exploit the public's desire to be guaranteed security. I want to pick up on that last point, because this is critical.

    As members of Parliament, of course, we represent a number of people and we talk to people both formally, as in these hearings, and informally in meetings and on the street. I can tell you that in my view the number one reason that people would be inclined to accept the introduction of a national identity card with biometrics, fingerprints, face scan, or whatever, is because they instinctively feel that somehow this would make our society safer. It would help us catch the bad guys. It would make us less vulnerable to all these potential terrorists or international criminals coming into the country and operating anonymously.

    I would be interested in having you address that belief, that feeling, that perception of the public. In any of your studies, did you reach any conclusions about that? Specifically, have you identified any security expert or international affairs expert who said to you or had written a brief or paper that said a national identity card with biometrics that can fully track people will help to keep our society safer?

º  (1600)  

    Ms. Wendy Danson: To answer your question quickly and simply, I don't know of any studies or briefs that the CBA has prepared or is able to provide you in that regard.

    But to take a little more depth into it, your question is, would it make society safer for all of us to be mandated to require a national identity card? Well, one doesn't know. I think those questions that we asked earlier would have to be answered. Who would be able to demand proof of that identity card? Who will we have to show it to? In what instances can we be stopped and asked to prove our identity? Certainly if there's a concern that you're being involved in something criminally, the police have a right to request identity of you. When I go shopping at the corner store, nobody does; I'm on my own. When I'm stopped in my car, yes, I could be asked to prove identity, but that is done through my driver's licence, which contains only a certain amount of information.

    Terrorism today knows no boundaries, and I would submit that a national identity card is not necessarily a panacea to stop terrorism. Likely, terrorists won't carry cards--if you're worried about that kind of security. The guarantee of security is a guarantee from the foibles of humanity. I don't believe technology will solve that problem. It's a bigger problem than technology.

    In terms of the other comments you made with regard to identity theft, you brought in that magic word that bothers me: the MasterCard. Well, certainly my MasterCard would not be a gold mine for anybody, but if it were taken.... I think a lot of the misapprehension that may be going around is that this national identity card will prevent theft. Much of the identity theft that is going on, I would submit, is in the electronic commercial field, not in the government field--or maybe in the government field, but this committee ought to address very carefully whether a national identity card is meant to be available and accessible to commercial enterprises.

    Right now, if I choose to do banking online--which I consider a private issue, not a governmental issue--I submit to those risks. Will a national identity card now be available to my bank to allegedly protect me online? Is it the mandate of government to be providing those guarantees to the private sector? Those are very serious questions that need to be addressed.

    Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: I have just one other question for you, as law interpreters. That is, do you believe and have you any opinion on whether a legislative structure could be created that would ensure that identity cards would not be used for fraudulent or criminal purposes or for improper use by government?

º  (1605)  

    Ms. Wendy Danson: One can always put the legislation into effect. One can always develop laws, which is what we are submitting should be done in the development of a policy.

    Can one guarantee those laws will never be broken? We're dealing with people; I don't think that's possible.

    The other issue we'd speak to here is that once that technology is in place, once something like a national identity card is in possession, we have grave concern there will be a demand for its use by non-governmental organizations, companies, and businesses that are not included in that legislative scheme. So if it's required of me to travel.... If a national identity card is required for me to access government services, that is one thing, and that may be the legislative scheme. But if I'm going to take a loan from my bank, rent accommodation, or do any number of private things--go into a store to shop--and my national identity card is being requested as proof that I am who I say I am, which is one of its purposes, as I understand it, to me that's an abuse of the original purpose and something that can't be legislated.

    For example, I had to show my driver's licence to come in here today. This is a government body, but it's not the Alberta government body. I had to show my driver's licence to get on the airplane to come down here. That's what other people have referred to as “function creep”. I call it the slippery slope. It's available. It's a nice, tight little card. It must mean something. It's quite sophisticated. But it's being used in places that weren't originally anticipated, and perhaps it shouldn't be.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral): Before I turn the floor over to Mr. Bergeron, I have a question for you, further to the exchanges with Ms. Ablonczy during which mention was made of credit cards. Several groups were involved in the drafting of your brief. Was any one of these groups specifically interested in financial transactions and in the whole question of security surrounding these transactions?

[English]

    Ms. Tamra Thomson: The privacy law group, in particular, looks at privacy in terms of both government action as well as commercial action, and indeed, it examined it in the context of such laws as the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral): Fine then. Thank you.

    You have the floor, Mr. Bergeron.

    Mr. Stéphane Bergeron (Verchères—Les-Patriotes): Thank you, Madam Chair.

    Thank you for your presentations and for agreeing to come here.

    I don't want to speculate as to the outcome of this committee's work, but my sense, and my concern as well, is that we are busy playing the sorcerer's apprentices. What worries me even more is that right now, we really have no idea of the ingredients that we are stirring into the pot. Therefore, we could be very surprised by the final outcome.

    We read in the newspaper where information about social insurance cards is being stolen or where CCRA notices of assessments are being sent to the wrong persons. When such mishaps occur, the government merely promises to do better the next time. However, misplacing information, whether deliberately or accidentally, can have potentially dire repercussions.

    A number of questions certainly come to mind. I admit that I haven't had time to read your submission in its entirety, but based on what you've said, I'm somewhat concerned, because I was expecting to get a legal perspective on some of the questions we have. As a parliamentarian, I was caught off guard when you asked us questions and we couldn't give you any answers. However, you've clarified your position on this issue and perhaps when we've read your brief fully, we'll have the answers we want.

    Having said that, I will nonetheless venture a few questions of a legal nature, since that is your area of expertise.

    In your submission, you note that should Canada bring in a national identification system, it must meet any national commitments made as well as any international treaty obligations. I have two related questions for you.

    On the one hand, some of the international treaties that Canada has signed are naturally designed to allow for the identification of foreign travellers. However, would such a national identification system violate, in your opinion, the terms of international human rights treaties to which Canada is a signatory?

    On the other hand, would the introduction of a national identity card constitute an infringement on privacy rights within the meaning of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Privacy Act?

º  (1610)  

[English]

    Ms. Wendy Danson: There are a few answers I might respond with here.

    As far as some of the recent breaches we have seen and your statement that we're assured it won't happen again are concerned, what I tried to say earlier is that technology is something developed by humans for human usage. When humans use it, it's almost guaranteed there will be error on occasion. So to say this won't happen again is probably not a guarantee anyone can give. It's fine to have rules that we lock things up, that there are passwords to get into them, and they won't be broken, but people do make mistakes. They aren't necessarily intentional at all, but that's part of being alive and human.

    So I don't think we can think of technology as a fix. It's a tool. Just as one tool never does the whole job for you when you're constructing something, neither will one technology fix or biometric scheme be able to guarantee the kind of protection we're talking of for individual privacy.

    Your second question is whether we saw the national identity card being in contravention of any of our international obligations, if I understood you correctly. At the moment we would be of the understanding that any policy would be developed to fit into our international and national obligations. Do these two obligations conflict? Do some of our national obligations conflict with some of our international ones? They likely will.

    For example, if countries demand certain requirements of biometric identification to get entry while we, as a country, for our own citizens may decide we don't want that, we have to make a choice. If someone wants to travel internationally, they may have to do that. But we have to be careful doing it. It's fine to talk about westernized countries, where there are securities built into their systems when we show that identification, but what about carrying a biometric card or a card with biometric identifiers that gets into the hands of a country that doesn't have the protective laws Great Britain or the United States have? We have to think about that carefully.

    Secondly, I think I understood you to ask whether there might be some infringement of the charter or the privacy rights legislation. In our brief, we do comment on that. The charter does protect the right to liberty, and that right to liberty may include the right to privacy. That is something that has to be considered very carefully in terms of the degree to which any new system will make that private information more available.

º  (1615)  

[Translation]

    Mr. Stéphane Bergeron: I realize it's hard for you to comment since the exact nature of this new card remains a mystery, to all intents and purposes. I apologize for belabouring the point, but this is important to me. Given what we do know about the proposed national identity card, in your opinion, would it constitute a reasonable infringement on the rights set out in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and a reasonable infringement on the personal privacy rights set out in the Privacy Act?

[English]

    Ms. Wendy Danson: In the absence of a policy directive and the principles it's founded upon, we have said on page 15 of the English version of our brief that if a national identity card is to be introduced, it should be limited to a card that confirms identity and status only, with or without biometric identifiers, but that it not be linked to a broader database. There may be some reason to upgrade our current identity documents--passport, Alberta driver's licence--and take advantage of technology in doing that, but only insofar as it provides identification information, such as who we are, our date of birth, perhaps a fingerprint, perhaps an iris scan. That's it.

[Translation]

    Mr. Stéphane Bergeron: Since we're on the subject, I have three questions for you. To my mind, there are already a slew of documents that establish our identity, including a person's SIN card, health insurance card, driver's licence and passport. Such documents already contain information about our personal lives. My first question to you is as follows: in your opinion, what purpose would be served by adding a new, more comprehensive document to the existing mix?

    Secondly, what purpose would it serve to have a document that would allow residents to cross the border into the US, when people already have passports that normally should serve that very purpose? According to my sources, one of the features of the SIN card is that new information can in fact be added to the card.

    Therefore, my third question to you is as follows: shouldn't we be adding new data to this card, instead of creating an entirely new card?

º  (1620)  

[English]

    Ms. Wendy Danson: In response to your point about the proliferation of the cards we have, my understanding was that a national identity card was going to try to capture the information contained in some of those cards and perhaps reduce the number that one might have to carry. We said in our brief--and I mentioned this earlier--we believe that the national identity card, or any identity document, must be specific and limited in use. So the social insurance number is required for employment purposes and to access federal benefits. The driver's licence is limited theoretically to driving the car. The passport is limited to international travel. One can choose whether to have those documents. In some cases the health card is absolutely a requirement, and some would say the social insurance card is a requirement, but not all of these cards are required. If an individual chooses to have the benefit of what those cards provide, then they are agreeing to give up that information, and they should be entitled to make that choice.

    Would one card encapsulating all of them be better? Again we submit that the founding principle must be a very limited intrusion into privacy, and for a specific purpose. To have one card that contained all sorts of information for any anticipated and perhaps unanticipated purpose might be more comprehensive as such, but it would not meet what we see as being the more important goal of respect for privacy.

    Your last comment was on whether it is possible to use some of the other cards we are already developing, and embed information in them, if I understood you correctly. That is something we think has to be looked at. It may be possible to use the passport a little bit differently and introduce new technology to it, to satisfy our international obligations. Nobody uses the passport internally, for the most part. If we find we have an internal demand for some kind of a national identity document, we need to establish what that is.

    Mr. Stéphane Bergeron: But we know there isn't. The only need for this new identity card is to allow us to travel to the United States. What's the point of having a passport if, in addition, you need an identity card to go to the United States?

    Ms. Wendy Danson: You just told me something new. I didn't realize the only purpose was international travel.

    Mr. Stéphane Bergeron: That's how I see it.

    Ms. Wendy Danson: I'm an immigration practitioner, and in my experience people travelling know they must carry passports. Even though it's not a requirement at the moment for the United States, people engaging in international travel know that's the most secure way to travel. They do it and they're not concerned about doing it.

[Translation]

    Mr. Stéphane Bergeron: I have one final brief question, Madam Chair. To the witness, in your opinion, should the national identity card be mandatory for all citizens, or should it be strictly a voluntary system?

[English]

    Ms. Wendy Danson: I think a system that is voluntary won't work. But in terms of requiring all individuals to carry one, I submit that there's no proven need.

    Mr. Stéphane Bergeron: I do agree.

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral): Monsieur Pat Martin, it's up to you now.

    Mr. Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre, NDP): Thank you, Madam Chair, and my compliments on your first time in assuming that seat. You're bringing great dignity to the role, and performing admirably.

    Thank you, Wendy Danson. I also agree with Mr. Bergeron that you've helped us capsulize this whole debate in very clear language. I think it's an excellent brief. That's partly because I agree with most of the points you make, of course, but it's very helpful.

    I've been trying to put it into a context I can relate to, as it's a complex issue. I come from the building industry, and before an architect begins to design a building of any kind they meet with their client and ask about its usage--what they want the building to do. Even before that, the client has to decide if they have a need.

    I think you've identified those steps quite well in this context. We've put the cart ahead of the horse here; its a solution in search of a problem. We haven't really identified whether we have a problem, and whether this new card will even satisfy any perceived problem. The only thing I've heard around this table is a possible need we might have, or a possible benefit, as Mr. Bergeron suggested, with travel.

    I wish Mr. O'Reilly were here. He said at one of our meetings that this card would be a good thing to have, because then people with Down's syndrome would have some identification they could carry. I almost fell off my chair.

    We heard from both privacy commissioners--in fact, the current privacy commissioner--that there would be huge costs, in his estimate, billions of dollars, to implement this thing properly.

    I know I'm not asking a question.

    When the committee toured Europe and found countries where they had national ID cards, they were mostly former fascist places, because they have a history of them. Hitler thought it was a great idea, as did Mussolini, Franco, and Stalin. North Korea and Vietnam have them, but in those countries they're tied to benefits. The national ID card is state controlled in those places, but in other places benefits flow from citizenship, therefore you have to show the card for benefits.

    People have said that one of the reasons to have it here is to stop the cost of people fraudulently drawing benefits. Do you have any information, or have your sectors done research, on how much social services fraud is perpetrated by refugees, new Canadians, or even landed immigrants? There is welfare fraud out there, but it's not necessarily done by people...we don't know who they are. I've heard that very low figures, like 0.6% of welfare fraud, for instance, can be traced to illegal immigrants or people who are in the country illegally, which we might argue a national ID card would tighten up. Is there any research on that, or anything you know regarding people claiming benefits who wouldn't otherwise be entitled to them, that this card might address?

º  (1625)  

    Ms. Wendy Danson: I'm going to start from one of the first points you made, with your analogy to the construction industry. It has always been our thought that your committee is climbing a very steep staircase when you're talking about introduction of a national identity card, but we think you must start at the first step before you can get to the top. The national identity card sits there at the top waiting to be addressed, but as you stated, you must understand what purpose you're trying to achieve with that card before you grab it. Secondly, in climbing those steps, one must always be cognizant of the Canadian value to intrude as minimally as possible into the personal rights and freedoms of individuals.

    There may be some railings on the way to help you get up there, but those are the things you need to identify. And it can only be done step by step; you can't leap from the bottom step to the top and say, “We're here; we're going to talk about the pros and cons of a national identity card”, because the first few steps haven't been put into the foundation yet. That was my first point.

    As for your comment on international travel, it's difficult to compare European countries with our own, although we might consider them part of the western democracies. Their proximity geographically to each other and the travel between them is something we don't experience in Canada. Without fully understanding their cards and the purposes of their cards, I would say it might be applicable to us only in so far as travel to our closest neighbour, the United States, is concerned.

    The costs are of concern to us as well. We think there should be some information available now within the Department of Citizenship and Immigration on account of the permanent resident card process. That's a mandatory process for all new immigrants and all current permanent residents in Canada who wish to travel. They're being granted by way of an application process and they have very tight security features incorporated into them. It would seem to be incumbent on this committee to make some inquiries of the department about the success of that card and its costs, so as to have one measure of how one identity card works.

    The information I have gained in my practice is that these cards were fraudulently duplicated within six months of coming out. That goes back to my other point—that one should expect that to happen; therefore, the least amount of information on it the better.

    Finally, your question about studies of how much fraud has been perpetrated by immigrants and refugees is something we do not have information about at our fingertips. Certainly from my experience in my practice, refugee claimants and immigrants—permanent residents or successful refugee claimants—are very tightly monitored by Citizenship and Immigration until they become Canadian citizens. The permanent resident card must be renewed every five years. There's a very stringent form that must be completed to get it, complete with all of the periods of residence during the previous five years. As a refugee, one must always notify immigration of one's current address. One is moving through a process of hearings and appeals, and the identity of such people is generally known. To suggest they would be involved in some kind of fraudulent claiming of social benefits—

º  (1630)  

    Mr. Pat Martin: It's probably not a widespread problem.

    Ms. Wendy Danson: I don't have details. I would doubt it's a large segment.

    Mr. Pat Martin: Yes, I was just looking for verification of some of the things we've heard to that effect.

    I'd like you to expand on the idea: if the card is to be optional, then what's the point? It wouldn't satisfy any of the real or perceived benefits. If it's mandatory—I think you raised this question in your brief—who would be able to demand it, and when would you have to produce it? You said when you go to your corner store you don't expect to have to have your ID with you. What's worrisome to us, if it were mandatory, is a police state kind of environment. Does it mean that if I'm just going out for a walk late at night I'd better have my mandatory national ID card with me? If something is mandatory, there would have to be consequences for failing to carry it. Is this the kind of thing you meant by “creep”? I'm not trying to invoke images of a police state here, and I'm not saying we're going in that direction by implementing a national ID card, but as a lawyer, what would you see? There has to be some enforcement mechanism to make somebody comply with a mandatory provision. How would you see it unfolding, were a national ID card mandatory?

º  (1635)  

    Ms. Wendy Danson: I'll tackle the optional one first and then get to the mandatory one.

    If its primary purpose is to enable or facilitate travel to other countries that we have an international obligation with, then there's no reason why it cannot be optional. Those persons who want to travel can then decide whether they wish to go through the optional process. Once again, our position is that it should be an identification document—and not one attached to a database with all sorts of other extraneous information—for the purpose of travel.

    If it were mandatory, as you say, you wouldn't be thinking of carrying it down to the corner store. We have concerns that most people would not carry it on a day-to-day basis. We have major concerns that there will be tremendous loss of this card by people perhaps obtaining it and then putting it aside and misplacing it. I suspect, without knowing for certain, that this is a problem with the social insurance number. Most of us know what our number is, but if you ask me where my little plastic card is at this exact point in time, I would have to say I don't exactly know. I suspect this might become a problem here—its being lost, or maybe getting into the wrong hands.

    As to the enforcement side, yes, I agree with you. You called it a police state. I don't use that word, but I do say it is a form of government control of its citizens. It's not only control in the sense of being able to demand you produce the card to check your identity—and one has to wonder when and in what circumstances that would happen—but if it's mandatory and one is not able to produce the card, there has to be a consequence, if the policy is going to have any kind of substance to it, to penalize those who are not carrying it or are disobeying the law. Now we're talking about a whole new enforcement stream, independent of the one about requiring you to present it, but enforcing against those who are not. That causes some concerns.

    Mr. Pat Martin: Very briefly, to summarize your advice to our committee, or to the Government of Canada, it's to put the brakes on this; to slow down or stop the process, at least until we've addressed some of those earlier policy questions about what we're seeking to achieve here. Would that be a fair summation? If you were to give direction to the minister, if he were sitting where Madame Dalphond-Guiral is sitting, would you say to him, “Stop it”?

    Ms. Wendy Danson: I would certainly say he should put on the brakes, slow down. It seems to me this committee has done a lot of work and has much knowledge behind it now. Whether it can use that knowledge as a springboard to put together a white paper for public debate is a possibility. If this committee does not feel it has enough resources to do it, then we have suggested the government set up either a task force or something like it to develop a white paper that can answer those questions: what are the purposes, what are the objectives, how can they be implemented, and what are we as Canadians prepared to recommend?

    Mr. Pat Martin: Very good. Thank you very much.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral): Go ahead, Mr. Pacetti.

[English]

    Mr. Massimo Pacetti (Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, Lib.): Merci, madame la présidente.

    Thanks for your conciseness. I think you've brought up some good points.

    I'm just going to ask a quick question. Some of the points were already covered, but I guess I don't see it the same way. I think you convinced everybody that we do need an ID card; you just said it yourself, that you came in here with an Alberta licence card. What would happen if you weren't a car driver; what would you have used?

    We're lacking an ID card. I think this is what this is. It's not a question, do we need an ID card? I think we do have the ID card. I think the question is, what are we going to do with the technology that we have today—and the committee has seen a lot of different forms of the technology? How can we implement it in the ID card so that it's going to be more efficient?

    Let's face it, all that technology is there. We go to the bank; we've got the Internet; and people have information on us whether we like it or not. We have cellphones, so people can track our phone calls. If somebody wants to know where we've been and what we're doing, it's not that complicated to do. If people want to find out from the government where we've been, they don't have to steal the computer, but can just ask somebody else to get that information.

    I think the question is more, what are we going to use the ID card for? Can we use it for something else? Can we also replace the SIN? Can we also replace the passport, or can we use it in conjunction with the passport?

    Nobody said that the ID card is just for government services; nobody said it's for travel; nobody said that we're going to use it for commercial transactions. That's another area we haven't even started looking at. Maybe we can go into partnership with commercial institutions, like banks, and maybe defray the cost. We haven't even looked at that aspect. The technology is there; it could be two-way or one-way technology. We can't stop it, it's there.

    I think the questions you gave us are the questions that the report asked. We just worked on a report that pretty well had the same questions, which I think is why we called it an interim report.

    I don't want to repeat what's already been said. I just feel that if we're going to come out with an ID card.... Your position is that it just be an ID card; but could it not be useful so that I don't have to carry a wallet with 55 other cards? Don't you feel that would add some kind of benefit, to amalgamate it with either the government services, or with the passport, or with some other type of card we have? People go into banking institutions, and the banking institutions ask you for two pieces of ID. So if you're not a driver and you don't carry a passport, your one piece of ID is probably your health care card.

º  (1640)  

    Ms. Wendy Danson: With respect, you and I would be on opposite ends. I don't have 55 cards in my wallet, but maybe four or five. If one contained the information that your 55 had, I would be very nervous, because I don't want to be carrying 55 cards. I know you're exaggerating, and I'm sure you don't have 55, but it seems to me that if one chooses to carry a dozen, it's an awful lot of information with different sources that you have chosen to let out.

    Perhaps I don't use the cellphone for that same reason, especially as a lawyer. I make my calls on a land phone. So there are ways to protect our privacy now.

    I think to suggest that the government be at the forefront of encapsulating all of those private details and information on one card and handing it over to the commercial sector; and to the provincial sector, which has my federal information; and to the federal sector, which has all my provincial information, is an infringement of the rights of individuals in our eyes. As I was saying a little earlier, I would submit that we're not wedded to technology. Just because the technology is there doesn't mean we have to take advantage of it. We need to identify that it can be helpful for other purposes and utilize it, but it should not be driving the bus.

    Mr. Massimo Pacetti: So how do we use it?

    Ms. Wendy Danson: I think we need to establish what it's for. If it is for—

    Mr. Massimo Pacetti: If it's for ID purposes, can we use the card for anything else?

    Ms. Wendy Danson: When you say “ID purposes”, you have to say ID to whom?

    Mr. Massimo Pacetti: It's your ID...for a bank, if you want to open up an account. Or let's say the U.S. decides to accept it, though we're not even sure if they will. Let's say the U.S. will accept the ID card when you cross the border; that will prevent people from getting a passport. Will we be able to use the ID card for anything else?

    Ms. Wendy Danson: But the two things you have just said there are almost diametrically opposed. Going to a bank, which is a commercial, private sector matter, and going across the U.S. border, which is more an international political protocol, to me, are different purposes.

º  (1645)  

    Mr. Massimo Pacetti: No, they're both for proving your identity, I'm sorry. They're for different purposes, but the end result is to prove your identity.

    There are other examples.

    Ms. Wendy Danson: Is it the government's role? Is the government going to change its direction and entertain a national identity document for use by the private sector? If so, that needs to be debated and stated.

    Mr. Massimo Pacetti: The private sector uses the provincial health cards and the federal social insurance cards. So they use them anyway.

    I'm just saying it's going to be implemented, but is it your organization's position that it only be used as an ID card? I guess that's the basic question. Can we use it for other purposes where it doesn't really infringe?

    I feel that the technology is there, and I think this card is endless. It just depends what are we going to agree on, and this is where we're having a problem with this document that you have. These are all valid questions that you ask. We're looking for some answers as well.

    Ms. Wendy Danson: The breadth of what you're suggesting it might be used for causes me grave concerns. I think this is exactly the concern we have: it will get out of hand; it will get into the wrong hands. If it's simply stating my name, my birthdate, and perhaps has my fingerprint, that's one issue, but if it has access to embedded information, if it's tied into my health matters, to me, that's a very severe breach of my privacy. This committee has to decide where the outer limits of that card are and that if a card were introduced, you can be assured that those limits would be respected.

    Mr. Massimo Pacetti: That's all. Merci.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral): Before I turn the floor over to Ms. Ablonczy, I have two short questions.

[English]

    Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: I'd like to say something on Mr. Pacetti's point.

    On page 24 of your brief, paragraph (c), you make the following statement: “If the card...would be applicable to citizens, there would at most be a marginal benefit, as many already possess satisfactory evidence of status” through other documents. I think that's true. I know people who don't drive, including one in my own family who has not the slightest problem participating in all aspects of our society that she chooses to do. She just doesn't have a driver's licence. It doesn't mean she's crying for the government to bring out a national ID card for every single citizen. To cover those few people who might not have a driver's licence and who, for some odd and strange reason, wouldn't have any other ID either, spending $5 billion to do that makes no sense at all.

    But what I want to put to you is a scenario about the use, the universal use of a national ID card, because the point of a national ID card would be so you could prove who you were.

    If it were just you, your picture, and your name, like a driver's licence, we have plenty of those. But what we're talking about is not another card like your bar association card or my House of Commons cards, or the 99 other ones we have; we're talking about a national identity card with biometrics.

    If the card has biometrics and it is going to be used to identify you, then somebody has to match your biometrics with the biometrics that are encoded in the card, whether it's your fingerprints, your face scan, or your iris scan, or whatever it is. The only way they're going to be able to do that is to have scanners--correct?

    The only way those scanners are going to be able to confirm that the person who holds this card and that person's biometrics are one and the same is because there's a database behind the card and the scanners that makes those matches and brings back a confirmation--correct?

    And if there is a database behind these biometric cards, then someone controls the database and the information in the database. So if I go to the corner store and they say, before I take your Visa card, I want to make sure you're Diane Ablonczy, then they have to be connected with some kind of database. If you want to go to the bank and get money out, ditto.

    All these scanners have to be installed, and everybody who's using this, including the landlord who might use this, has a scanner hooked to a database, and every time you access the database, there has to be some record of it put into the database, to make it work. So what we have here is essentially a database that is potentially tracking all your activities.

    Right now, my driver's licence tracks only my driver's record, my medical card tracks only my medical services, and my passport tracks only where I travel--and actually it doesn't do that, because there are no entry and exit controls at this point, but potentially it could. That's fine, if I choose to travel, if I choose to drive, or if I need medical services; all those information bases are held in silos. But if you have a one-card-fits-all that is scanned to confirm your identity for each and every transaction, you have an enormous database.

    Now let's talk about databases. We have a kid hacking into the Pentagon computers. We have the revenue minister up in the House of Commons, yesterday and today, trying to defend and explain why a computer in a Revenue Canada office, containing the personal information, including SIN numbers, of 120,000 Canadians, went missing and what happened to that data. Every day you hear horror stories about how vulnerable databases and the storage of personal information are.

º  (1650)  

    When we say we don't want to have a card we have to present for each and every activity we engage in, it's not because we don't want to prove who we are. We do that every day of the week, as Mr. Pacetti says. There's no problem there. I expect people to want to know who I am and I'm quite happy to tell them--especially during an election.

    Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

    Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: What I don't want is that every time I tell somebody something and get a service in return, there will be some centrally located record and tracking of my whole life, because my life is my business. As I said, knowledge is power. I don't want everyone to know my business. If I did, I'd post it on the Internet like some people do, but I don't want to.

    That's really what we're dealing with here, and it seems to me that if I can make this connection, the lawyers who studied this, the Bar Association subsection, must have made it. Well, I'm a lawyer, but I'm sure people who are actually practising law instead of having segued into politics must have thought of it too.

    My question to you is--and you connect this with privacy--what problems can you foresee in having the kind of system I've described? Unless you can point out some flaws in my chain of reasoning here, what problems can you see with having this system? You have other people on the committee saying, what's the problem? We need these ID cards and we present them every day. You're saying you have a problem with having to present an ID card even though you do all the time. I'm suggesting the problem is because of the biometrics, the scanning, the central database, the tracking, and the record keeping. Tell me whether this concern I'm articulating is one you share and if you have any observations about whether we should go in that direction as a country.

    That was short, wasn't it?

    Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

    Mr. Stéphane Bergeron: No. I have heard shorter questions in my day.

º  (1655)  

    Ms. Wendy Danson: I'll address the first comment you made, about the person who doesn't have a driver's licence and is not able to identify himself. My province, Alberta, does have something like a driver's licence. It's an ID card for people in that very situation. It has the exact same information on it except for giving the authority for the individual to drive, so there are identity cards available should one choose to get them. In some cases people say, I don't need it, and if someone thinks they need it, they can apply for it. I don't know if other provinces do that, but it's certainly something other provinces may wish to address if they feel that need.

    You articulated quite well how an ID card with biometric data would be used if it was to be used properly. The technology geeks--and I don't mean that in a negative sense, because I admire them--the people who devise the technology, would anticipate that the card could be read and, by the fact of it being linked up to a faraway off-line or online database, could identify through that electronic manner what's going on.

    Yes, you identified the concerns we had, and they are not only security, where you suggested both the fraud problem and the theft problem, which are two different issues entirely, but also the idea of someone having all that information compiled in one place. Even assuming it's secure, is it necessary to have it? Those are the very real issues.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral): I now have two questions for you.

    One would have to be blind not to notice that since September 2001, certain groups have been labelled as potentially dangerous. Do you think that listing a person's place of birth on the identity card might give rise to discrimination of some kind? That's my first question.

    My second question relates to the security of primary documents. Although times have changed, I recall the days when people had to go to their church to obtain a copy of their birth certificate. I've done that on several occasions, either to get copies of my own, or my children's, birth certificates. No one ever asked me to produce identification. I imagine anyone who looked like a mother could request a birth certificate.

    Perhaps similar problems have arisen elsewhere in Canada. If the primary documents are not extremely reliable, then the card itself is not 100-per-cent reliable.

    Are you concerned at all about this?

[English]

    Ms. Wendy Danson: Your first question was, should the place of birth appear, or if the place appears, is it a cause for discrimination? It may well be; it's hard to know. Certainly one would hope within Canada, with our multicultural commitment, it would not be. Is it at the borders? We've already seen that it was in one case in the United States.

    The other question that flows from that is, if one were to remove the place of birth, would that prevent racial profiling or discrimination on the basis of race? That causes me concern too, because I would submit that a person of a race other than Caucasian or with a name other than Anglo-Saxon will still face that risk of discrimination on the basis of name, colour, or appearance.

    Again, the way to overcome that is to promote our policies for respect and inclusion of all Canadians within the country, and that is done in our policies, both immigration and citizenship and multiculturalism, and they must be promoted so we have that tolerance internally. Externally, it's a difficult call.

    On your second point, I'm familiar with the Quebec baptismal certificate from my immigration practice, and for many years that was a document accepted by immigration officials. It is now seen as one open to fraud and is not widely accepted as an identification document any more.

    I did say that I hope we gave you the message that there is room for using technology in identity documents. The time may be here when we have to upgrade our current identity documents such as the passport and the social insurance card. If we can do that and utilize some of the advances in technology, that's not a bad thing. We just have to do it cautiously and carefully and make sure there are protections when we do it. If we decide to include fingerprints, do we know who's going to use it, when it's going to be used, what the risks of using it are, and what the costs of using it are?

    If we say we understand all those but it's the most minimal way we can identify someone for travel purposes or for federal benefit purposes, then that's a policy decision we've made. But that's the climbing of the steps; we're doing it step by step.

    I'll conclude just by saying that there is room for technology and of course we should take advantage of it, but we should know what we're doing when we do it.

»  (1700)  

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral): Thank you. Are there any other questions?

    Thank you both, Ms. Thomson and Ms. Danson, for sharing your views with us and for answering our questions. The matter still requires further study. We'll certainly heed your appeal to proceed with caution. In any case, in life, rarely do we go far when we go too fast. It's always better to proceed with caution. In fact, many of the witnesses have emphasized the importance of weighing carefully the many implications of the proposed national identity card.

    On behalf of my colleagues, thank you very much for coming . Thank you as well for being patient with me. I am also grateful to the vice-chairs for their support.

    The meeting is now adjourned.