Mr. Chairman, distinguished members, thank you for the opportunity.
Captain Paul here indicated that we're finalizing a white paper on security, which we've been authorizing from the security committee. We hope there will be viable recommendations for your consideration. These mostly stem from discussions with our members on a daily involvement on the front line of the airline industry, from discussions with other pilots, both domestic and internationally, and from attending many of the international security conferences.
In the interests of brevity, I'll confine my remarks quickly to outlining a couple of main concerns that we have from the ACPA security committee.
In the aftermath of 9/11, we recommended that a single federal government department be responsible for civil aviation security. This did not occur. Currently, civilian airport authorities, crown corporations, and numerous other bodies all own parts of the aviation security program in Canada. We have carefully assessed the system as to the way it now operates, and we reaffirm our recommendation for a single federal government department to manage the aviation security in Canada.
Second, the position is that we need to fight terrorism through proactive intelligence-gathering and good police work. I cite a very strong case here of the liquid bombers in England in August 2006. They were not brought down as a result of screening. They were solely brought down as a result of good investigative work, good intelligence, good police work.
As a part of the proactive effort, we are also very much in favour of the behavioural pattern system using behavioural pattern recognition techniques; however, we are opposed to it being implemented and utilized by CATSA.
Frankly, we believe this may cause more problems than it resolves. Behaviour pattern recognition is a complex program. It requires experience, and operators who are intuitive and can establish trust within the airport community.
Finally, we're anxious to see affirmation of several recent government reports, including the Auditor General's report on airports, the RCMP criminal intelligence report--called the “SPAWN report”--and the CATSA review, which all basically state that ground crew access to air terminals remains a pre-eminent threat. ACPA supports additional scrutiny in all ingress and egress points at airports and the screening of these employees, their company equipment, trolleys, and bags.
Those are our major concerns. More specific measures will be spelled out in our white paper, as mentioned.
Thank you very much for this opportunity.