It's not hard to tell there's a very significant divergence of opinion here today. Some of it, I suspect, is what I would call a philosophical view of this type of arrangement; some perhaps...and I don't like to use the words “tainted” and “politics” together, so I'll refrain from saying that.
But one of the statements made was that someone could just say they were a terrorist and wanted a boarding pass. That would be like somebody walking down the main street of any city, town, or village saying they were going to rob a bank and then expect nothing to happen.There will be consequences to ridiculous statements.
I think we've probably highlighted some of the perceived inadequacies of those types of response to what is a worldwide problem. And of course we know that smart people—the people who really want to do us harm—will use every means possible to get around any kind of safety net we may have in our society. I was very happy to hear you articulate the fact that this is just one of several layers of security that are designed to take away the angst from the travelling public, specifically Canadians, when they want to travel by plane, because it's much more convenient in a large country like ours. I have family in British Columbia, and because of my current job I don't have a lot of time to visit them, so I can't drive or take the train. I'll take an aircraft. I think most Canadians would want to know that everything reasonably convenient is being done to provide safety.
This is leading me to a question, and the question is, has your department looked at other nations' programs to see if they have programs like this, or what in addition we can do? Have you looked at best practices worldwide? Who has the best aviation security, and how would or wouldn't things work here, given Canadian society, because of our laws? Have we done that?