November 7, 2003

Concerns with a National Identity Card

As your Member of Parliament representing you in Ottawa, I want to inform you about some of the issues surrounding the government proposal to bring in a national identity card.  The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Denis Coderre, has proposed the idea that all Canadian citizens be issued a national identification card that would include biometric identifiers.  Biometric information would include information such as fingerprints, facial or retina scans.  I must state up front that I believe the idea of a national I.D. card should be abandoned immediately.

My experience with the Liberal government’s attempt to catalogue all guns in a national registry immediately raises a red flag.  The government’s estimates were completely unreliable, and the gun registry has already cost taxpayers five hundred times more than originally announced.  Our Liberal government claims this national identity card scheme will “only” cost three billion dollars.  Other credible estimates say it could be at least seven billion.

The gun registry experience should also cause us to ask whether the intention to secure our borders could be more cost effective.  Why not increase our border security?  (The Liberals abolished our Ports Authority a few years ago.)  Why not increase our military strength and start patrolling our borders?  Why not put more police resources into our spy agency and into fighting organized crime and others who are bringing in illegal goods and people?  Or why not enhance the security of Canadian passports and more rigorously screen those entering our country?

The gun registry is not the only incompetently administered Liberal program:  remember the Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC) big brother database that had to be dismantled when it was accidentally discovered; the millions of dollars in G.S.T. fraud; the 5 million Social Insurance Numbers unaccounted for; and the significant problems with many of the other government database systems?  These should serve to convince Canadians that the government should not embark on a comprehensive identity card scheme.

But there are other important concerns.  A national I.D. card violates the privacy rights of Canadians and is an invasion of our civil rights that could set the stage for possible abuse.  The information on the card could be crossed-referenced by other government agencies or fall into the wrong hands.  This would enable a person’s healthcare record, employment history, driving information and financial history to be easily accessed by all government agencies.  And, we have already seen examples in Canada of information disappearing and falling into the wrong hands.

The Liberal government hates the idea of a DNA database for criminals, they dislike the idea of a database for sex offenders, and they are not willing to implement permanent resident cards that include biometric information;  yet they want to make every Canadian citizen carry a personal identity card.  Why does this Liberal government want to track every single honest Canadian, but at the same time make no effort to control criminals?