Public Safety committee  Absolutely. No one is suggesting that appropriate, proportionate, efficacious security programs should not be employed on airplanes. There is now not one iota of evidence that no-fly lists are any of those things.

Public Safety committee  That's correct.

Public Safety committee  Oh, absolutely. No one is disputing that the issue here is not that. And as I've said, Canada has sovereignty over its airspace, as does the U.S. What is being asked for is a complete reverse of what is the standard norm. And as I have said, none of these things ever rebalances in the other direction.

Public Safety committee  Certainly that is ideal. I'm suggesting that we would be on a good footing, I think, with countries the world over who are facing these same dilemmas relative to the mobility rights of their citizens.

Public Safety committee  I've never heard any suggestion that we have, or how it might be vetted if we were to do so.

Public Safety committee  We have those concerns, absolutely, and they're shared by our colleagues at the American Civil Liberties Union. The concern about political profiling, along with racial and religious profiling, is real. The people you described in that list very much echo the people who complain to us about Air Canada's domestic use of the U.S. list.

Public Safety committee  I'm referring to the fact that the U.S. no-fly list is going to be de facto imposed on Canadians for a raft of reasons and is in fact imposed now for various means. I suggest that the confusion we were seeing in this committee has to do with which list is which, and who's who, and what the Canadian no-fly list is.

Public Safety committee  This is the political and diplomatic dilemma. Yes, indeed, we have sovereignty over our airspace, but every other country does as well. So I think the point here, as little as it suits me to discuss with parliamentarians what parliamentarians should do relative to diplomatic relations, is that surely this an issue the world over.

Public Safety committee  As to aviation security, we've asked several times, which is why you would hear the language that the representative from Transport Canada was using about this being part of a multi-layered holistic program. It's because the actual evidence for this program is virtually non-existent.

Public Safety committee  We believe that the system is deeply flawed and that improvements are welcome, absolutely.

Public Safety committee  I would have to vet that to our entire group, but it is an improvement, absolutely.

Public Safety committee  I can make a couple of preliminary comments on that. It actually seems, as I have indicated in my comments, that what's really at issue here is trying to ram the passenger protect program into these provisions that were never actually envisioned to encompass the program, which is why we don't actually give notice to people.

Public Safety committee  Mr. Chairman, committee members, thank you very much for having us. My name is Micheal Vonn and I'm a policy director and a lawyer with the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. These prepared remarks are meant to complement those of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group.