Thank you for having us here today.
We are a part of the organization called the No Fly List Kids. We're a group of Canadians whose names are flagged on Canada's no-fly list, otherwise known as the passenger protect program.
The attention that this antiquated system has received is international to the point where it was even mentioned by Conan O'Brien on the late show back in February of 2016. This list includes people of all ages and from a variety of diverse backgrounds. In fact, Senator David Smith and former defence minister Bill Graham were both falsely flagged on the no-fly list at one point.
My own son Adam who is now eight and who's here with us, has been flagged on this list since he was a newborn. We first flew with him when he was six weeks old. He must be visually identified each time we travel by air. Once we were delayed in Mexico coming back into Canada on a Canadian airline when our passports were confiscated for an hour with no explanation.
Having a child falsely flagged routinely results in travel delays, inability to check in online, increased scrutiny by airline and security personnel, and stigmatization and marginalization, queuing up the next constitutional crisis. False positives of the no-fly also raise serious privacy implications as well as potentially affecting the charter-protected mobility rights of Canadians under section 6.
Some of our children have been denied initial boarding and delayed to the point that they have missed flights internationally. All the no-fly list kids avoid travel due to the potential for stigmatization. We have some teenagers on the list. They're with us here today as well. All families find that the security screenings become increasingly invasive as the children get older.
Additionally, though this list contains names of people from all backgrounds, it does skew toward Muslim- or Arab-sounding names, thus questioning the violation of their rights under section 15 of the charter, which protects and promotes equality under the law.
False positives also hurt business travel. Stephen Evans, who is also with us here today, was the chief technology officer of Kijiji, and he has also held senior positions at MSN, Canoe, and the Toronto Star. He has written a piece in The Globe and Mail about his experiences being on the no-fly list. He is one of several executives who have shared their stories with us.
With bad data like this being shared with foreign nations, and due to the nature of bilateral information-sharing programs, Canadians also run the risk of being falsely flagged in foreign jurisdictions and by agencies that may not uphold similar values of human rights and life as we do here in Canada. Innocent people risk being associated with acts they did not commit, resulting in possible detention, false imprisonment, and torture, as happened in the past with Maher Arar. His case is a classic example of bad data being shared with, and abused by, a foreign country. Mr. Arar will have the stigma and trauma of this experience with him for the rest of his life, and this gross oversight cost the Canadian taxpayer $10 million. We cannot risk having this happen again to one of our children as they grow up.
Since 2008, Canadian domestic carriers are not required to screen passengers against the U.S. no-fly list on domestic flights, even if they enter U.S. airspace, yet Air Canada in particular is known to continually ignore this directive. Authority needs to be removed from the hands of the airlines to make decisions and screen at their discretion.
My eight-year-old son has been designated high profile since infancy. I do not want him living with this cloud of suspicion lingering over him for the rest of his life. He is a child now. I will be around to protect and advocate for him, but this won't always be the case as he grows older.
In 2009 the United States shifted this responsibility from airline operators to the TSA and has since seen a significant decrease in the number of redress requests. This is important because approximately 98% of the applications to the Department of Homeland Security's traveller redress inquiry program are deemed to be false positives. Most of the children and adults we're speaking on behalf of here today have applied to the DHS TRIP in the United States, and they have been cleared. Yet they continue to face issues while travelling domestically in Canada or internationally on Canadian airlines.
The passenger protect program is airline-designed and contains names only. It does not contain any other identifiable data to distinguish between two people with the same name.
In Canada currently, if a person finds themselves falsely flagged on this list, no mechanism is available to them to get themselves removed and separately identified. These systems exist to law enforcement agencies country-wide: police forces, CBSA, and CSIS. They even exist in school boards.
In November 2016, in The Globe and Mail, Mr. Robert Fife reported that the federal government had approved a redress system in the amount of $78 million annually until 2022, and $12 million every year thereafter to manage the data system changes. However, for reasons unknown to us, this wasn't actually approved in the 2017 budget.
In conversations with senior leadership at major tech companies, we have been told that the daily consulting rate at Accenture, for example, is $1,800 a day. At 200 working days per year, that would mean the $78 million cost would take 194 man-years to build this redress system. The cost estimates are curiously high, and there has been no transparent process used through an independent RFP to get independent estimates on the cost. Even conservative estimates find this number very hard to understand.
Consequently, in the 2018 federal budget, we must have full funding for the build and implementation of a redress system for the passenger protect program. A program like this will result in fewer false flags, and improvements in the efficiency and security of our human rights system, as well as air travel, and our entire national security regime.
Thank you.