Madam Speaker, I am very happy to raise this issue. I know the parliamentary secretary, who will be responding to me, is very eloquent so I hope he will put his podium and canned notes away because I am going to turn it just slightly. I do not want to talk about the badges and the stolen clothes but if he recalls the question that we are dealing with, I talked about random checking, and that is the issue that I am particularly concerned about.
Random checking is where we have airport employees, everyone from concession operators on air side to the window washers, baggage handlers and everyone, who do not get regular security checks. They get random checks. They come and go, back and forth, and they are subject to random checks, which means a lot of the time they go through without any check at all.
We have talked to CATSA at Transport Canada about operating some kind of system for pre-security clearance for high frequency travellers, suggesting that this is probably a good way to cut down on CATSA's workload, to move the travellers more efficiently, to get more value for the money for Canadian travellers and to cut the cost down, seeing as how the government imposed 100% of the cost of this on the travelling public in an airline industry that is already in trouble. So we have random checking already in place.
Now, either the government believes it is safe, in which case it should introduce this for high frequency travellers who have been pre-screened and who have submitted to a full security clearance, or it should admit that this random checking of airport employees is dangerous and unsafe and that it will start doing absolute full security clearance whatever the ramifications might be.
The United States is already doing this. Several airports have a test program under way whereby they are doing just exactly this, pre-security clearance for high frequency travellers who have submitted all the information and gone through the complete security screening. Is Canada waiting to follow in the footsteps of the United States, to let the Americans do the work and then make the decision that if it is safe for them then I guess we can do it without going through this, or are we doing something on our own?
The final questions I would ask and hopefully get a response on are these. Is Canada consulting with the United States on its program of pre-clearance of high frequency, low risk travellers? Is Canada developing its own system of doing this and, if so, when can we expect to see something like this put into operation?