Source: The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms
John Carpay of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, writing in the Epoch Times, is looking at a line buried in the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority’s corporate plan. CATSA, working with Transport Canada, is studying biometric screening at pre-board checkpoints. The plan, tabled in the Commons on September 16, contemplates scanners for Canadians on domestic flights by 2031. No cabinet has announced a mandatory national digital ID. Carpay’s point is that the plumbing is being laid anyway, and plumbing has a way of getting used.
The pitch will be speed. A face or fingerprint check can take a couple of seconds. Looking at a licence already takes three to five. The delay at a gate is rarely the agent staring at a photo. It is the tunnel, the bins, the people who boarded in the wrong order. None of that is fixed by giving Ottawa a copy of your face. When you hand a licence to a flight attendant, she does not keep a file. A biometric system has to store something, somewhere, for some period of time, accessible to someone. CATSA has not answered those questions in a way the public can test.
Biometrics are not a password. If a licence number leaks, you get a new card. If a face template or a fingerprint set leaks, you are stuck with the body you have. Carpay’s blunt line is the right one: the only safe biometric database is the one that does not exist. Section 8 of the Charter is supposed to mean something here. Informational privacy includes control over when and how facts about you are passed around. Building a travel system that only works if you surrender data you can never replace is a search in slow motion, sold as a queue-management tool.
“Voluntary” is the other word that should make people nervous. Vaccine policy started as a choice and became a condition of work and movement when the politics shifted. Once the cameras and the templates are installed, a later government does not need new hardware to change the rules. The question is not whether today’s minister promises the scan is optional. The question is who will own the system in ten years, and what stops them from tying it to more than a boarding pass.
Carpay wants Ottawa to explain the need before it collects the data, and then to say exactly what is stored, who holds it, how long it lasts, who else can see it, and whether it can be reused for anything other than getting on a plane. Until those answers exist in public, a domestic flight should not require you to donate a face that cannot be cancelled. Convenience is a weak reason to build infrastructure that is much easier to expand than to unwind.
