Evidence of meeting #51 for Public Safety and National Security in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was you're.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Sue Barnes Liberal London West, ON
Please verify that if I have a boarding pass in my hand, I know then, at that moment, that I have not been on your list, that I'm free to go.
Chief, Security Policy - Aviation, Security and Emergency Preparedness, Department of Transport
Yes.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Garry Breitkreuz
Sir, may I interrupt on that? I can get a boarding pass without going to the airport.
Liberal
Sue Barnes Liberal London West, ON
It's my time, Mr. Chair. Could you let me pursue that, Mr. Chair? It would be a little fairer.
I'm back in 2004. I don't use computer access to boarding passes, but I understand that if I'm getting on a plane tonight, Air Canada would allow my office to pull my boarding pass off the computer. So you've got a list, and if you were supposedly on this list, you could access the information on whether you're on that list by accessing your boarding pass prior to arriving at the airport.
Chief, Security Policy - Aviation, Security and Emergency Preparedness, Department of Transport
Thank you. May I address that?
Liberal
Chief, Security Policy - Aviation, Security and Emergency Preparedness, Department of Transport
No.
Liberal
Sue Barnes Liberal London West, ON
So I can get a boarding pass today and verify that I'm not on that list.
Chief, Security Policy - Aviation, Security and Emergency Preparedness, Department of Transport
Yes. If you're on the list, you won't be getting a boarding pass on the Internet. You won't be getting it out of a kiosk either.
Liberal
Sue Barnes Liberal London West, ON
That's my point. So why don't you let Canadians know that? If they can have a boarding pass before getting to the airport, we might not have these crises at the airport for some families.
Chief, Security Policy - Aviation, Security and Emergency Preparedness, Department of Transport
Thank you. I appreciate that. It's absolutely true.
Chief, Security Policy - Aviation, Security and Emergency Preparedness, Department of Transport
We're advertising it. It's in the regulations. It's in the information, but we can update the website to put it in bold letters, yes.
So in other words, if you get a boarding pass, then you're not part of the program. That's how it works. So the idea is denial of boarding passes--
Liberal
Sue Barnes Liberal London West, ON
So maybe Canadians might need to know that? Put it on your website.
Chief, Security Policy - Aviation, Security and Emergency Preparedness, Department of Transport
I appreciate that. It is on the website now. We can put it in a more prominent place. That's how the whole thing works.
Liberal
Sue Barnes Liberal London West, ON
Okay. I've got to tell you that I'm going to get the calls--and they come to my home, not just to my constituency office--when people are refused. I have communities that have many different similar names, just like my colleague Mr. Chan. We are going to have those calls. I hope I don't get very many. I hope you're absolutely right, because we're faced with this in a couple of weeks.
But it seems to me there are ways you can let Canadians mitigate the problems of upsets at the airports and mistakes. One of them is to say that if you have an airline that allows you to get a boarding pass through your computer in advance, you do that, and then you can be assured you're not on the list.
I don't get it that you guys don't help people.
The other way to look at this, if I were the devil's advocate, is this. Say I'm a terrorist on the terrorist list; I'm going to check whether or not I'm going to get on this plane by printing their boarding pass. If I can't print it off my computer, obviously I'm on a list and I'm not going to get on that flight. So maybe that prevents, in an indirect way--Mr. MacKenzie, I'll give you this--someone from getting on a flight. But--
Chief, Security Policy - Aviation, Security and Emergency Preparedness, Department of Transport
Just to say, there might be multiple reasons--
Liberal
Sue Barnes Liberal London West, ON
Now, the other thing is that I have no knowledge, because I don't travel every airline in the world. I don't know what other airlines besides Air Canada have advance boarding tickets. Do you have that information?
Chief, Security Policy - Aviation, Security and Emergency Preparedness, Department of Transport
Yes. In terms of printing boarding passes in advance, I know that it's widespread across North America and I think it's probably spreading internationally. And I would guess--
Chief, Security Policy - Aviation, Security and Emergency Preparedness, Department of Transport
I'm focused on security. I'm focused on developing programs like this. I don't run an air carrier and I don't know what every air carrier's business practices are with regard to boarding passes and how quickly they give them or upload them. So no, I don't have a chart of that. That's air carrier business.
The point is that there are multiple reasons why you may be denied a boarding pass. It could be because you're on this list. It could be because you didn't pay for your ticket last time. It could be because of a hundred other reasons. So there's no notification at that point of whether or not you're on the list, but it is true that if you have a valid boarding pass, then you're okay to board the flight. You have to show ID before getting on the flight, and the name on the boarding pass has to match the name on the ID.
Yes, we could certainly make that more prominently known to people, so sure, that's a great suggestion.
Liberal
Sue Barnes Liberal London West, ON
I have people who don't have Internet access in communities not far from populated areas, so they're not going to be able to get that access because they're not Internet-served, potentially, or they don't have the ease. They can't make the phone call, but they can find out by trying to access their boarding passes on that day, before leaving home to go to the airport?
Chief, Security Policy - Aviation, Security and Emergency Preparedness, Department of Transport
Yes.
Liberal
Sue Barnes Liberal London West, ON
Thank you.
Now, once you're on a list, it's really difficult to get your name off. In the age of Internet, lists keep on going forever.
You're going to have a board of reconsideration. I don't want to mislead the public into thinking that you're going to act in 30 days, because you're not; you're going to only act--hopefully, within a 30-day time period--after you've received the information. No person is going to be able to contact you. We won't even know the names of these people who look at the cases. In one of our last meetings, we were told that people won't be told why they can't get off the list.
But let's presume a happy outcome right now. We're going to get somebody off the list because it was a false positive. How do you contact...or do you do anything to notify all the places the list went to with the bad name and the inconvenience to this person? How do you get their names off, considering that these lists may now be in other countries, because some of these people we've shared the lists with through the airlines may have breached your guidelines and regulations and shared them with other people?
Conservative