Senator Dalphond: Thank you, Senator Ataullahjan, for this question.

I’m not the expert on the issue, but there is one in this chamber. It’s Senator Jaffer. She made an important declaration at the committee study when she referred to exactly that type of experience and why she is always singled out in the line for a “random” check and sent to the second line. When she shows her green passport, they apologize and say, “Oh, sorry. It’s a mistake. We should not have called you for a second inspection.”

No doubt the system is not perfect. The current system is, according to some witnesses and the personal experience of Senator Jaffer, certainly deficient, because it seems to target some people more than others, especially after 9/11. Regarding the threshold that is being proposed, the evidence shown before the committee has illustrated that it is designed to codify the current practices of the customs officers.

Senator Dagenais asked an important question. He asked how many more employees they will need to teach these new criteria, because it’s a new test. Therefore, it will have to be explained carefully since it’s not a test that has been applied so far. It’s not the reasonable test that has been understood and developed by the courts. It will take time to flesh out.

How many more officers will you need? How many more training sessions? How many hours will you give to the officers to understand that new concept? The response from the border agency representative was, “No problem. We already have the training in place. We don’t need more people. That’s already what we do.”

What they are saying is that what they intend to do is to have this new threshold be equivalent to the current practice. But the current practice is in the guidelines; it’s not in the law. They say now that it’s in the law, it’s valid. I fear that, in practice, what is going to happen at customs won’t change with this new test. The old practices will continue under a new hat.

It’s important to me that we better define and flesh out the concept of reasonable suspicion or reasonable grounds to suspect rather than have a new test. This is the concept that has been recognized elsewhere in the act, so let’s be consistent. Either they change the whole act, or they change it only for computers, which is very unconvincing to me.