Foreign Affairs committee  In addition, it costs more because we are providing emergency passports to people who have lost them or who had their money and ID stolen. This means that more in-depth identity checks have to be carried out in Canada before travel documents can be issued.

Foreign Affairs committee  I believe Canada currently has access to 164 countries around the world without requiring visas. That's really quite extraordinary.

Foreign Affairs committee  There are two types of issues, in terms of security. One is the security of the book itself. The security of the book itself is improved because we have put the chip in it; we save the information to the chip. There is, as I mentioned earlier, a public key infrastructure. Border

Foreign Affairs committee  I was just going to answer that. If somebody applies for a second passport in a different name, we always run a check against our database. We say, “Well, wait a moment, we have issued you a passport already.” We have found fraud in that way, where people have applied under diffe

Foreign Affairs committee  As I mentioned before, there are two types of radio frequency identification tags. The kind of chip in this is what we call a proximity chip, so you have to be within 10 centimetres. The other type is a vicinity chip, which can be read from 30 metres away. That's a very different

Foreign Affairs committee  There are a few notable exceptions, but as far as international comparisons we're way up there at the top of the pack in our access. If we didn't go to an e-passport, our concern was partly that we would face more visa requests from more countries. As part of their border securi

Foreign Affairs committee  A number of features protect the security of the information. The difference between a regular passport and an electronic passport is that this has a chip in it. This is what it looks like. It has a little gold thing on it. Other than that, it's exactly the same. The information

Foreign Affairs committee  Of course. The consular fees do not come to us. They go directly into the fund— I'm going to have to use the English expression—Consolidated Revenue Fund. Consular affairs are a departmental responsibility and this has no impact at all on our program. However, in connection wit

Foreign Affairs committee  We don't have any control over the arrangements between the department and Finance and Treasury Board in terms of how much money is then transferred to the Consular Affairs section of the department, but I can assure you that the $25 fee is deposited directly into the Consolidate