Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I have to say that you're not convincing at all today on all the arguments that you're trying to put forward. I have three major concerns with this system.
One is the ID process. Regarding the list that you showed us, many of these could be easily falsified. It would be tremendously impractical to get someone from the airline to know how to identify false IDs just on this list, never mind additional IDs that might or might not be acceptable. As for training someone to identify what is a falsified driver's licence from across the country, there are 10 provinces that have 10 different drivers' licences issued, health cards. Even on your list there are a lot of holes to allow falsification.
You identify a passport as something that would secure the idea of people, yet on the other hand, there's a long list of IDs that are acceptable. So your argument that using a passport is a good one falls down the hole.
The other issue is about this security thing. Even if I agreed with you that if you can catch one incident it's worth troubling about 80% of Canadians—I don't agree with that, but even if I do—I'm worried that this system has such big holes to try to catch a small fish that it would have no added value to the layers of security that you're talking about.
If someone can falsify any two pieces of ID and buy an airline ticket off the Internet through somebody else, and they just pick up that ID and they take it to the airport, there's no way you can catch him, unless he has been tailed by the security officers all along. And if he has, you don't need a no-fly list, but at the same time about 20 million Canadians will be disturbed in this process.
And what's worse, you're creating a false sense of security for the public, while actually this has no value at all to the layers of security that you talk about. That's the first concern that I have.
The second concern is, how does someone get on the list? There is an opportunity that people who are not convicted will be on the list--suspects. The first criterion that you mentioned--a terrorist suspect, no matter where the suspicion comes from, could be on the list. Mr. Arar could have been on the list.
The problem I have is that they trample on civil rights. And the reverse onus on that individual to prove that he doesn't have some kind of guilt to be on the list violates our basic principles, the fundamental judicial right of due process for Canadians. That's what I worry about.
The third thing I worry about is that the airline could share this list with other authorities, and that impedes the privacy of Canadians.
So far, listening to all the responses that you have to the different parties, I'm not convinced. You're not convincing me how this could be worthwhile, and at the same time you're causing a lot of headache to a majority of Canadians. With any approach of any system that we want to impose, we have to balance between the effectiveness and the usefulness of the system and how much trouble it will create for Canadians and how many rights we have to trample on.