In December I signed a treaty with U.S. Ambassador David Jacobson, which we will table shortly in the House of Commons as a precursor to its ratification, a comprehensive information-sharing agreement with the United States that is part of our beyond the border action plan between the Canadian and U.S. governments.
This information-sharing agreement will massively improve the quality of our immigration security screening, because it will allow us to share, initially, biographic data on applications for temporary residency in Canada from around the world, and eventually, biometric data as we put in place our new fingerprint system later this year.
Those records, those names, and eventually fingerprints will essentially be, to put it in common parlance, “pinged” against the U.S databases, which include records on tens of millions of foreign nationals. So their databases are far more robust than ours are.
That is to say that the United States has much more robust databases that include foreign nationals who may represent a security risk, who may have been deported from the U.S. for criminality, who may be on watch-lists for national security purposes.
So by pinging these names, and then fingerprints, against the U.S. databases, what will happen is that if there is a match, if they see that their records have someone on a watch-list, or someone who was previously deported, that match will come back to us as a positive hit. Then the CBSA will basically pick up the phone and call the Department of Homeland Security to do a manual verification of the identity, to make sure it's not a false positive, and then find out whether or not the person is admissible to Canada.
As a last point, this will all conform to Canadian privacy laws.