Senator Cotter: I wasn’t intending to enter the debate, but particularly Senator Jaffer and Senator Ataullahjan’s observations about the risks of stereotyping and particularly vulnerable, marginalized or racialized communities invite me to pose this question of you. This is the only part of the bill that has given me concern.

You have spoken to the three words that we have been debating and that have been amended out of the bill. The word I’m most interested in your viewpoints on is the word “general.” I accept your observations about “reasonable” requiring an objective articulation, but the fact of the matter is that people who do get stopped at the border are stopped as individuals. For the life of me, I don’t understand why the choice of a word like “general” as opposed to “specific,” even with the word “concern” was adopted. It seems to me the word “general” invites a border guard to use criteria that are not specific to the individual. As a result, it invites the very kind of concerns that our last two questioners posed. Could you speak to that?