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Canadian
Legislation
Canada did not take the thought it may be the porous border
lightly. In response to September 11th and as a general trend in the
world for greater public security, Canada passed a number of statutes in
late 2001 and early 2002 addressing public security. There were acts to
amend the criminal code. The Anti-Terrorism Act and the Budget
Implementation Act served to amend close to 20 statues including public
safety and charities registration.
There were two statutes introduced along with them. The Charities
Registration Act for Terrorist Funding and Biological Toxins Weapons
Convention Limitation Act were passed as well as a number of Acts
relating to air, port of entry, the criminal code, export/import.
There were a number of changes.
One of the more interesting ones was the Pre-clearance Act,
passenger regulations.
A list of
information is now given by Canadians to the Americans at our airports.
The list is of everyone coming in on our flights that may be in transit
to the U.S. so that the U.S. knows in advance who will be traveling thru
Canada to the U.S. If they have concerns based on the name and passport,
they have a right to get another 20 or 30 questions answered about that
person. We in turn obtain from the information from the airline. The
additional information may include who the travel agent is, where they
live, their phone number, and where they are going. The days of privacy
are changing, but as you will see from this declaration there is lot of
information sharing going on between governments.
We did have deficiencies in our law. We are not perfect. We
obviously saw we had holes in our own laws that need to be changed and
we have been acting on that. Canada announced it was going to bring a
new immigration act in December of 2001, which came into force on June
28, 2002. It is called the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.
It
is probably the biggest change in Canada immigration law this century.
The good news is that it did not change any of our institutions. Our
delivery system has remained in place and we have just given more
authority or changed the rules on different categories of immigration.
It had a dramatic effect on permanent resident calculations. We
made temporary entry easier than NAFTA.
We
have taken a lot of frequent U.S. business travelers into Canada and we
made them visitors as opposed to work permits, one category of workers
that we used to have to deal with. In addition to that it has given way
to faster examination because nothing has actually changed from a
practical delivery point of view. Canadian-U.S.
Joint Initiatives
There have also been a number of joint initiatives with the
United States. All of these affect the immigration area. The first one
was the Statement of Cooperation on Border Security and Regional
Migration Issues later seemed to be adopted more specifically in the
Smart Border Declaration and Action Plan, and also the Safe Third
Country Agreement, which someone mentioned this morning deals with the
duplication of processing of refugee claims.
We cannot have a refugee get refused in Canada and then come to the U.S.
We cannot have someone whose been sitting in the U.S. for a long time
come to Canada and claim refugee.
Pursuant to these three joint initiatives, Canada has the
Integrated Border Enforcement Teams.
IBETs are created from multi-agencies of law enforcement to allow
officials to share information and technology and to coordinate
activities between Canada and the U.S. so that they can avoid
duplication. The idea is to be better on enforcement at the borders.
They started with five. I think Mr. Hague mentioned this morning they
are up to nine, and will have 14 of these teams across the border by the
end of this year. Immigration control officers have also been sent over
by both countries to do pre-clearance and provide information to the
U.S. and to Canada. I think we have similar information being delivered
back to us. So both Canada and the U.S. can see in advance, people
traveling, if there is a worry of someone who is getting on the planes.
There is project North Star, which is increased coordination and
sharing of information among various police organizations, police or
security organizations. They also worked with the United Nations closely
in sharing information to come up with a list of terrorists and
individual organizations that individuals should be watching for and not
working with. Canada has adopted it under the United Nations Act and
also under the Criminal Code.
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