Thank you, Mr. Dubé.
One recommendation that we provide—and by the way, to answer Mr. Clement's question from the other day about recommendations, by now you should have our full brief in translation, with recommendations in it—is that it needs to be made clear that the refusal to answer any question asked by a pre-clearance officer doesn't in and of itself constitute grounds for the officer to suspect that an offence has been committed. Certainly, refusing to answer questions is germane to whether or not they want to let you into the United States, and that's their sovereign right, but someone's discomfort with answering certain questions isn't on its own, for our purposes, suggestive of an offence having been committed.
We note that a number of the standards have changed for doing certain things. Previously, in terms of someone being detained, if they weren't withdrawing, they could be detained by U.S. officers if it were believed—I believe it is—on reasonable grounds that they had misrepresented themselves to the officer or that they had obstructed a U.S. pre-clearance officer or had committed an offence under any act of Parliament. Bill C-23 expands this, or really just takes away those particulars and says that a U.S. officer is entitled to detain someone:
If a preclearance officer has reasonable grounds to believe that a person has committed an offence under an Act of Parliament,
We find this to be overly broad. It's not particular to when in time that offence happened. I don't suppose that U.S. officers will want to be on detention sprees, detaining people simply because of some conviction 25 years ago, but there may be some who would detain people on grounds that we might not find palatable, and this doesn't make it particular enough. When does the offence have to have been committed? Is it any offence under any act of Parliament? By the way, they took out the summary conviction or indictable offence piece. Does this mean administrative offences are now grounds for possible detention, however long ago they may have been committed?
We recommend that those be tightened up to state that U.S. pre-clearance officers should have the power to detain if they have “reasonable grounds to believe that the traveller has committed an offence under an act of Parliament, punished by indictment or summary conviction in connection with the travel”, or some wording that links the offence to the act that they're undertaking, to the pre-clearance of their travel.