Transport Canada unable to supply evidence that lists prevent terror
by James McNulty
Imagine that you are the subject of a restraining order, but are not informed of it by the courts.
You then stumble into the restrained zone by accident, and when arrested, ask why you’re under the order. The authorities refuse to tell you.
The cockeyed scenario simply wouldn’t be tolerated in today’s legal system — yet the federal government deems such nonsense perfectly acceptable for its new no-fly list.
Following the jet wake of the highly suspect American no-fly list, Canada’s “Specified Persons” roster is in fact a list of suspicious people compiled by the RCMP, Canadian Security Intelligence Service and Canadian Border Services Agency.
Said to number somewhere around 1,000 people, Transport Canada’s secret list is composed of people with past involvement in a terrorist group, who, “it can reasonably be suspected,” may endanger air safety.
Other targets include those convicted of a “serious and life-threatening” offence or crime against air safety.
Those people concerned about winding up on the list for the wrong reasons — think Maher Arar — have nothing to fear, according to Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon.
“I can assure passengers that they’ll be okay,” Cannon purrs.
It is an assurance he cannot make. Innocent people will inevitably end up on the Specified Persons roster, just as U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, Canadian MP John Williams and law-abiding ordinary citizens have found themselves on the American no-fly list.
No problem, says Cannon. If that happens in Canada, the improperly specified person can then apply to the Office of Reconsideration, a new Orwellian bureaucracy in Transport Canada’s maze of mysteries.
Should the Office of Reconsideration prove troublesome, no problem. The innocent traveller can then appeal to the Security Intelligence Review Committee, the RCMP Public Complaints Commission, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, or finally ask for a judicial review in Federal Court.
All this, on the basis of suspicion.
B.C. Privacy Commissioner David Loukidelis and his federal counterpart, Jennifer Stoddart, have major worries about Cannon’s “trust us” system.
Stoddart has said the list poses “quite a nightmare” for ordinary Canadians put in the “chilling” position of being improperly added to the file.
Other civil-rights critics suggest the list is useless, given that terrorists are unlikely to travel by their own names — echoing the federal Conservative argument that gun-control registries don’t work because criminals won’t register their guns.
Lindsay Scotton of Stoddart’s office says Transport Canada has failed to supply information showing that no-fly lists work.
Faisal Kutty, legal counsel to the Canadian Council on American Relations, told reporters that “common sense should make us wonder how someone can be too guilty to fly and yet be too innocent to be charged.”
Burnaby-New Westminster NDP MP Peter Julian predicts “the no-fly list will roll back our civil liberties with a steep increase in racial and religious profiling.” The NDP wants the list scrapped and notes the European Union “has rejected the principle and practice of no-fly lists.”
New Democrats and other critics would rather see the emphasis placed on reinforcing airport ground security systems, with improved personnel training and expanded luggage and freight screening.
In the meantime, Canada now has a no-fly list that updates Salem witch trial suspicions for use in Big Brother’s paranoid 21st Century.
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