Mr. Speaker, the member's excellent presentation regarding Bill C-42 explained the issues rather well.
Fundamentally, the government should be looking at improving security when dealing with air travel. One of the ways to do that is to look at the exposures that we have. The biggest exposure we have right now, according to the Allied Pilots Association, is the trusted shippers program where mail and packages go directly onto airplanes, sit right underneath passengers on the airplane, that are totally unchecked. These thousand-plus people in the trusted shipper program have not really been investigated, have not been checked, but once again, we are ignoring a major exposure at the expense of doing something like this which has questionable value.
When the Americans asked for this legislation, the government should have recognized that in fact there are maybe 100 Canadian flights flying over the United States, but there are 2,000 American flights flying over Canada. The negotiators should have been smart enough to say, “If it is good enough for us to give you the information, then why do you not give us the information?”
The government tells me that is exactly what it is prepared to do. The point is that the Canadian government is not prepared to pay the evidently half a billion dollars in developing the computer system necessary to handle the information. We are prepared to let the Americans foot the bill for the computer system. We are going to give them the information so they can keep it and for what purpose? There is absolutely no proof we are going to get any tangible results out of this. There are just more questions.
The Liberal Party should be asking more questions about this rather than blindly following the government, as it does with this bill and many other bills in this House.