Madam Speaker, the member knows that for any flight actually landing in the United States, the Americans get passport information before the flight actually leaves the ground in Canada. This legislation would basically extend that same process to flights that are overflying the United States.
It makes perfect sense to me that when the Canadian government is negotiating with the Americans, it would demand reciprocity. That is just the normal process. Thus if we are going to provide information on those 100 flights over American airspace, the U.S. in turn should provide us with information on 2,000 flights over Canada.
A member of the government told me the other day that the government could not afford to pay for the computer system to process all of the information and that because of that, the government had not asked for it. Had we asked for that information, the whole process would have ground to a halt, because the American airlines and the American public would have been enraged and would have gone to Congress and their senators and voiced their concerns. If so, this whole idea would not have been pushed with the deadline of December 31 and this other sense of urgency that we are seeing right now.
Furthermore, in the Canada-EU agreement, in regard to PNR management matters, the PNR is treated totally differently. There is a time limit for disposal of the data, which is not in this agreement before us, where the data can be held for 40 years. There is a limit on the data's use, which is not in this agreement. Under this agreement the data can be shared with other countries like Panama. There are limits in terms of the individualization of the data. The information is rendered anonymous so the security services can build up a profile without attaching it to any one individual. Is that not--