Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'll take them one at a time. Portugal was initially coming from behind. They were behind in doing their e-passport. They needed some help getting going on that, but now they've actually deployed automated capture of biometric information for their passport issuance and national ID issuance.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Okay. I wanted to pace myself. Our partner over there now is one of the European leaders in implementing that in other gates—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would think that safety and security have been enhanced. There have been cost reductions in their operations—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  They have saved money, and I think they have high acceptance, from a user point of view.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think that's true. Canada is starting to do this now, with the foreign residents program and the visa application programs. They're now looking at capturing face and fingerprint. It's a good step, but we haven't implemented any face recognition at the border to see if we can identify people who are coming in under good documents but with different identities.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  One of the systems that I really like is the one that Australia implemented. Australia was an early mover in going to an electronic passport. They then moved to having automated gates for processing of passengers, so if you're now travelling into the country with your electronic passport, you put your passport in and it reads that; it captures your face and says, yes, you can come in.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's NEXUS-like, but they chose a different route. They were going to go a NEXUS route and then they said, “Why don't we do something that works for everybody, not just for a few people who are going to pay $75 more?” So they took this route that builds on their electronic passport and the checks that you do to issue a passport.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The uptake on this has been very positive. They're now expanding that to other traveller groups as well.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I was working with the New Zealand people, and on the government side they saw only opportunity. I presented to the privacy commissioner and to other folks in New Zealand, and they saw that this would work and work well.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, I guess there are two points to that, or many points. First of all, I'm not on the government side, so I don't know what information they have in their databases, but I think you would find that the government has information on, say, human rights offenders who would be inadmissible.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think most information systems now include a statement of the purpose of the information. In this case, though, there's not going to be an opportunity to opt out. If you want to come to Canada, you will have to provide this information—that's the way I would expect it. You commented on plans to share the information.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's for everyone. It's a little simpler system. They request less information for the Australian one than for the American one.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's a good point.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think you'll find that a lot of government information has a policy associated with how it's retained, and it's deleted automatically as opposed to having to wait for someone to push the delete button.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think I should let someone else respond.