Thank you.
Let me say that, first of all, many of our peer countries have already adopted biometric visa systems, or are well on their way to doing so: the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and various European Union member states. In fact, the EU Schengen zone, as I understand, is moving towards a comprehensive application of biometric visas. So this is becoming the new normal.
Quite frankly, it is something that Canada should have started to do a decade ago in the new global security environment post-9/11, but for whatever reasons—political, I gather—chose not to. We have made the necessary investments. I think in total, over the course of the initial life of the program, we're investing in the range of $340 million in the development of the biometric visa. The department has already been working on the policy framework and the logistics of it for the past few years.
We have just identified, through a request for proposals process, a vendor to be the primary vendor for the technology. It will be available at our missions and at certain visa application centres abroad. It will begin in certain higher-risk countries. We don't have the funds to roll this out with 100% coverage overnight, so we're taking the Australian approach of a phased rollout.
Here's what's going to happen, very simply. For those countries for which the biometrics requirement comes in, a visa applicant, initially for any form of temporary resident visa—that would include work permits, students, and visitors—will have to either go to one of our missions or a visa application centre that is licensed by us to do this and furnish ten fingerprints and a digital quality photograph, which we will then check against our databases of people who are known to be inadmissible.
We will also, of course, continue to use our information-sharing agreements with international partners to share this information. If we find that someone, for example, is a known terrorist or a convicted criminal, or if they've been deported from Canada before—or let's say they've made a refugee claim in Australia or New Zealand and have been rejected and now are making one in Canada—in those instances we will be able to identify that person against our databases or those of certain foreign partners. In those cases, we will either call the person in for additional questioning, or request additional information, or reject the visa application.
That means that when these criminals who have been deported multiple times come in to our visa office and give us the fingerprints, we'll be able to say “You're not the guy you are claiming to be on the passport; you are this individual who has already been deported from Canada.” Then they will be denied the visa.
Most visitors will be approved with their visa, will come into an airport or port of entry, will go through the Canada Border Services Agency primary screening, and in most cases they'll have the visa—they will have obtained it after an initial screening—and everything will be fine.
In some cases, if we think there might be a problem, we'll ask them to go off to CBSA secondary at the port of entry and provide their fingerprints so that we can verify that the passport holder is the person who provided fingerprints back in the country of origin.
We are benefiting from the experience of other countries, so we are learning from some of the logistical mistakes they've made. We believe this will be a self-funding system funded by application fees. Again, it's the absolute sine qua non of immigration security. This will improve Canada's immigration security screening by orders of magnitude, and it is an essential commitment in the Beyond the Border continental security perimeter agreement that President Obama recently signed with our government.