Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, gentlemen, for appearing today.
My questions zero in on two particular issues. One is the trusted traveller program, or a synopsis of that.
I recently applied for NEXUS and a CANPASS, just to see what the system was and to understand better the issue of aviation security. To be honest, I never found it to be at all intrusive, but of course, I haven't gone for my interview yet. We'll see what happens there.
I had a chance a year and a half ago to travel to Israel with my mother and 30 people from a synagogue in New Jersey. It was quite interesting when I came back to Ben Gurion airport. Our vehicle got stopped and I was in the front, so they asked me a whole bunch of questions. I got out. He asked for my ID, and I told him I was a member of Parliament from Canada. As I gave him my ID and they started to take the luggage out of the back for five or six people who were in the same van as me, as soon as he saw my identification he immediately told them to stop taking the suitcases out, he put the suitcases back in, and sent me on my way, along with all my passengers.
This is versus the situation in Canada, where I travel pretty much every week or very frequently. I get asked what I do for a living and they send me to another second or third layer of security, which I've always found to be very interesting. As I say, I go though airports a lot, and I have, I would suggest, probably one in three times gone through another level of security screening, although I can come here to this place and walk around with total freedom and sit beside anybody I want, including cabinet members and the Prime Minister, without any issue of security screening. So I agree that there is an issue in relation to what we do.
In Israel in particular and other democracies across the world, is there a more robust system of trusted traveller, and to what extent do we exclude people? What percentage, would you suggest, of those people would be excluded as a trusted traveller versus the people who go through the first layer of security and the potential other layers of security?