Air travellers on standby for more changes

(Pawel Dwulit/Canadian Press)

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Travellers may soon find even more to deal with when flying outside of Canada.

This week, the federal transport minister announced Canada will speed up its plans to buy full body scanners. Ottawa placed an order this week for 44 new machines.  Some will be arriving in airports within the next few weeks.

The federal government has already tried one in a pilot project in Kelowna.

Transport Minister John Baird admitted the machines are not a perfect solution.

"The reality is, there's no system that is 100 per cent. It would be like we could reduce a lot of road deaths if we went to a 25-kilometre speed limit on our 400 series highways. The reality is, we have to take a balanced approach, based on the freedoms and civil liberties of living in a liberal democracy like Canada," he said at a news conference this week.

But some Canadians argue there is not the right balance between security and people's civil rights.           

They point to the Butt family, who was flying from Montreal to St. John's in 2007 and suddenly had trouble checking in.

Alistair remembers it well. "It was mentioned to my parents that one of your sons is on the no-fly list, and I instantly thought it was my brother because I knew I didn't do anything wrong."

Alistair and the rest of his family were surprised to learn someone else with the same name was on the no-fly list.

Eventually they were allowed to board. But ever since, his family has taken precautions about where and how often it flies.

"The first year, we made significant changes," said Alistair's mom, Heather Dunbar.

"We didn't go down south for our holiday. He had a chance to go on an international exchange. We went to Pittsburgh instead. He had a brilliant experience as a junior leader in an international camp but we drove him just to make sure he could cross the border without incident."

For Alistair, he says he never knows if and when it will come up as a problem again, and he's frustrated that not everyone understands how difficult that can be.

"People just don't take it seriously," he says. "They think it's something that's really ridiculous and I have friends at school and I'm talking to them and they say 'hey look, it's the terrorist!' and I just laugh it off. But it's something serious and I can't do anything and it could be a very bad thing if its not fixed for me."

In two years, the Butts have not been able to resolve the problem.

The International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group keeps track of families like the Butts who run into this problem.           

"The number of Canadians caught in the last two years is huge, and this will only increase substantially once [the U.S. Transportation Security Administration's] Secure Flight [Program] is in place sometime late in 2010," said Roch Tassé, the group's national coordinator.

The Secure Flight Program will work like this:

Right now, airlines that land in the United States must share their passenger lists, and passengers' basic information, with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

They run the names against their no-fly and terror watch lists.

But starting sometime in 2010, the U.S. will ask airlines to share that information from all flights that pass over the United States, even if the plane does not land there.

Tassé believes this should raise a lot of red flags for Canada.

"In our opinion," he said, "the airline giving this information to the U.S. might be in violation of the privacy regime in Canada that protects [the] privacy of Canadians."

According to Tassé, if anything, the last bomb attempt shows the problem is not the amount of information the U.S. is receiving, but how they use it.

"We're putting our attention by surveilling everyone, and therefore we're not focusing our limited resources on following the real threat. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack and instead of following the needle we keep adding hay to the stack, and we're running the chance of not finding the needle."

It's not just civil liberties groups who are concerned about all the new security measures. Airlines are worried too.

George Petsikas is the president of the National Airlines Council of Canada. It represents the major carriers in the country, including West Jet and Air Canada.

The council has asked that Canadian airlines be exempt from the new Secure Flight rules.

For example, it will give the United States, for the first time, access to names of all people who travel from Canada to Cuba.

"As we know, Canada has full and open relations with the government of Cuba. Cuba is a major destination for Canadians, a very popular destination. And obviously the United States sees things differently. How does that impact the ability for people to travel to Cuba freely who may thereafter want to travel to the U.S. on business or whatever other reasons?" Petsikas asked.

Petsikas is also unclear what airlines are supposed to do if someone's name pops up on a list.

"What happens if we have to deny those persons boarding?" he said.

"What happens if it's missed and for whatever reason through the system at check-in and in flight you get a call from the U.S. authorities and [they] say, 'Well look, this person is on board, we'd like you to land the plane right away or we'd like you to get out of U.S. airspace?' I mean, this has happened unfortunately in the past on some occasions. This has potential for disruption in that respect."

In the past, those calls have happened only occasionally, and they were all resolved without any problems.

But Petsikas is worried they will become more frequent once Secure Flight is extended to international flights sometime this year.

And then there's the cost of all of these changes.

The federal government collects between $600 million and $700 million a year from the airline sector, partly from a security tax added on to every ticket.

Petsikas doesn't want to see that tax go up.

"The impact has been major on the premium side of the market, business travel as we know," he said. "We also don't want to kill off discretionary travel, the guy who, the family who are counting money and spending after-tax income."

The Department of Public Safety is handling the negotiations with the United States on the issue of Secure Flight.

Officials would only say in an email that Canada will work with its allies on aviation safety and security.

And that leaves travellers, civil liberty groups and the airlines on standby in 2010, waiting to see if and when the rules around air travel might change again.