PUBLICATION: The Ottawa Citizen
DATE:
2004.01.14
EDITION:
Final
SECTION:
News
PNAME:
The Editorial Page
PAGE:
A18
COLUMN:
John Robson
BYLINE:
John Robson
SOURCE:
The Ottawa Citizen
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Here's
something you'll really like
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Do
you ever get the feeling you're being governed by a cartoon moose? If not,
consider the federal government's plans for a biometric national ID card.
In
a filler segment in the old Rocky and Bullwinkle show, Bullwinkle the moose
would invite his friend Rocky the flying squirrel to watch him pull a rabbit out
of a hat. "Oh Bullwinkle, that trick never works," Rocky would say,
and Bullwinkle would invariably and blithely reply "This time for
sure" before equally invariably pulling out a lion, a tiger or a
rhinoceros. Yet Bullwinkle was no more likely than Canada's federal government
to wonder why his trick kept going wrong.
Suppose
you were contemplating a potentially highly intrusive citizen registration
project involving more people, more complex technology and more information per
card than ever before. What's the first thing you'd do? Initiate a study group
on its relation to the Federal Plan for Gender Equity? Hire 10 expensive
consultants to ponder its bilingual aspects? Put out a press release on how it
will enhance public health care?
Perhaps.
But the right response would be to ask yourself whether you'd ever tried
anything like it before. If you had, and your attempts had often gone wrong,
you'd then try to figure out why, so you could avoid it happening again.
For
instance, the gun registry. Forget for now whether effective gun control is a
good thing, because there is little point in debating possible uses of a bunny
when all you can actually get out of your hat is a lion. How can the government
expect to register its citizens until it understands why it failed so dismally
in registering a far smaller number of inanimate objects?
Perhaps
by drawing on its extensive experience in registering citizens through the
Social Insurance card. But it looks more like a tiger than a rabbit to me,
folks. Again, forget for now any questions you may have about the project of
giving us all numbers to facilitate efficient processing of the human units.
Forget also that the government was less than honest in its initial assurances
that the SIN would only ever be used for pensions and unemployment insurance
(whose previous registration system had, believe it or not, collapsed into
chaos), and would never, word of honour, appear on the income tax form.
Sure,
we'd be suckers to believe it again. But at the moment my concern is with
preventing the state, not its citizens, from acting like a cartoon moose. So
remember the ruckus back in 2002 over the auditor general's warning that there
were some five million more SIN cards than Canadians over 20. And that back in
1998 the auditor general had issued a similar warning, about a mere 3.8 million
excess cards, prompting Human Resources Development Canada to leap into
committee (five working groups and a request for more money) but not to stop
accepting photocopies as proof of citizenship and identity. In 2001 HRDC found
that it had often mailed over 100 SIN cards with different numbers to the same
address within a year, in one case 225 of them. Might one ask why? Is it still
happening?
Next,
if you can stand it, consider recent revelations that there are no controls on
the issuance of Certificate of Indian Status cards. OK, they keep them in a
locked cabinet. But they mail out blank cards in bulk to First Nations who
request them without any kind of national control system. It looks like a
rhinoceros to me.
I
don't doubt that we need better border controls. But in devising them we need to
make sure we're debating the right issues. It's not even clear that biometrics
is a good technological solution, because when it fails, it fails badly. If
someone forges your instant teller card the bank can issue you a new one with a
new PIN, but if someone forges your biometric ID you can't get a new eyeball.
But the real issue here isn't the "fragility" of biometrics, or the
potential misuses of an effective national ID card. It's fatuous confidence in a
technological solution to a non-technological problem, the chronic tendency of
government registries to be riddled with errors.
The
federal government reaches into the hat and pulls out five million bad SIN
cards, a $1-billion gun registry full of laughable errors, and a big stack of
blank Indian Status cards that entitle the bearer to a range of expensive
benefits. Normal, three-dimensional people would be chastened by such
experience. Yet it remains blithely unaware, in fact and in rhetoric, that it is
even capable of making a significant number of mistakes, let alone prone to it.
Instead,
it says "Hey, citizens, watch me pull a reliable biometric ID card out of
this hat." And when we reply "That trick never works" it stands
there, looking stupid and self-satisfied, and says what it always says.
"This time for sure."
Arggghh.
John
Robson is Senior Editorial Writer and Columnist.
Listen
to him on CFRA 580 AM Fridays from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m.