I just want to follow the line of questioning that Mr. Dykstra started a few minutes ago and pick up on a comment made by my friend, Richard.
Richard, as you said, this particular piece of legislation is not a magic bullet to solve any fears of terrorism. First, as you know, we don't even really know what data is going to be collected. We presume name and birthdate will be the minimum.
The other big concern we have is that, as you said, that which we desire for ourselves we also want for others, especially when it comes to our liberty and freedoms, and privacy is one of those issues. I'm one of those people who travel a lot and don't have an access card because I don't want to share a lot of my data, not that I have anything to hide, but I don't know where else it is going to go.
For me, one of the major concerns we have around privacy issues is that first, we don't know what data is going to be asked for, so it's hard for us as parliamentarians to go one way or the other. The second one is ministry officials who were here were very informative and upfront with their responses. Every time we asked whom this data would be shared with, they said that it would be shared with nobody at this time. You know that whenever you hear “at this time”, it's going to go somewhere fairly quickly. That remains as a major concern because other people will ask why you can't share a name and a birthdate, but we don't know if that's the only information that's going to be selected.
I'm also hearing a lot of confusion about citizenship fraud and all of those things. This piece of legislation is not going to address citizenship fraud. None of us wants to see citizenship fraud. We all want to see that cleared up.
For me the question always goes back to what we are trying to achieve with this piece of legislation. If it is simply to have that biodata, birthdate and name, don't we already have that on the passports? A person cannot enter our country without a passport. If it's somebody entering without a passport, ETA isn't going to stop them. What is it we're trying to achieve here if everything we need is on a passport, can be read off a passport, can be stored and is stored?