Mr. Speaker, I think the hon. gentleman may be misunderstanding the facts. When Canadians cross the border into the United States, they show their passports. Travellers disclose the information. They hand their passports to American border control officers and they run it through their database system to determine if there are any flags, warnings, or whatever. The traveller discloses the information in order to gain permission to enter the United States.
What this new system means is that the Americans will then transmit that data instantly back to Canada so we will have that information on the Canadian side and can know that a particular person left Canada at this departure point at this time. The system will work the other way around, for people crossing from the United States into Canada. The person would show his or her travel documents to the Canadian border officer and the Canadian border officer would, in addition to doing the normal checks on the Canadian side, send that information back to his or her counterparts in the United States.
Indeed, the only information that is involved is that basic ID data contained on page 2 of a person's passport. People should not have any elevated fears about any incursion into their privacy as a consequence of this. There will be among all government departments formal information-sharing agreements that will specify precisely the limits that will pertain to the use of this information.