Madam Speaker, when people buy airline tickets they do not need to have criminal record checks. Let us suppose someone suspected of hijacking an aircraft a year ago in some other country happened to be in Canada, the paperwork had not followed and he or she had not been arrested. Let us suppose such a person went to buy an airline ticket. Surely the average Canadian would agree that a warrant for the arrest of an accused or convicted hijacker is relevant to whether the person should be allowed to get on an aircraft.
The only way we can deal with this is to allow passenger lists to be verified in the usual way by our police forces. They can do this kind of thing using the databases and indices they normally use. This would mean turning passenger lists over to the RCMP and/or CSIS. We do it now with the American authorities so we can fly our aircraft into American airspace. Under Bill C-55 we would do the same thing here. If we did not we would be stupid.
Are there privacy issues? Yes, there are. Everyone who bought an airline ticket would have his or her name on a list that went through a computer search. That is one of the implications of 9/11. We must realize that. We all said it would happen. We all said the world would change. We said big brother would be following right behind. It is here and we must deal with it.
I am not prepared to accept that we cannot find out who is getting on an aircraft because of privacy concerns. Our police make us all more secure in the public interest. We must let them do their job. We must co-operate not only with our police but with police agencies in other countries. We will find a way to do it properly.