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Canadian border officials to share travellers’ info with U.S. government
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Canada-U.S. border data exchange program with other federal departments, Torstar News Service has learned.
The program, in which Ottawa and Washington will start sharing their citizens’ travel and biographic data this summer, means anyone from Canada travelling to or from the United States by land can have his or her information passed on to federal departments.
The Canada Border Services Agency confirmed the new practice and said data would be passed on only in accordance with stringent rules.
But the revelation is raising questions about privacy, how the information will be used and whether the federal government plans to use this data to crack down on immigration, citizenship, health and tax cheats.
“With this system, it is a blank cheque to the Big Brother. Where you go and when you go becomes government property,” said immigration policy analyst Richard Kurland.
Kurland said the data collected can be used as an enforcement tool of immigrant residency and citizenship laws for newcomers, as well as in the application of health care and taxation rules for Canadian citizens by counting their days spent in Canada.
CBSA spokesperson Esme Bailey would not say if this new program would be used as an enforcement tool for purposes other than border security. However, she said “access to the information will be limited to designated users with an operational requirement for the information on a “need-to-know” basis.
“All personal data received will be stored in a secure database and IT safeguards and restrictions will be in place in accordance with the Government of Canada security policies and standards.”
The CBSA wouldn’t specify which departments would have access, but added the data wouldn’t be shared with the provinces.
Currently, under the bilateral “Entry/Exit Initiative,” Canada and the United States are already collecting and exchanging the entry data at all land border ports of entry of third-country nationals, permanent residents, visitors, foreign students and those who are here on work permits.
But beginning this summer, the scope of the program will be extended to all people travelling through land border crossings, including Canadian and American citizens.
Ultimately, in the program’s final phase, Canada will develop a system to establish exit records similar to those in the United States, where airlines are required to submit passenger info on outbound international flights.
The personal information collected includes a traveller’s name, date of birth, nationality, sex, document type, document number, work location code/port of entry code, date and time of entry, and the country where the travel document is issued.
“The Entry/Exit initiative will allow the Government of Canada to better manage access to Canada to enhance security capabilities,” said CBSA in an internal operational bulletin issued in June.
“It will also increase the effectiveness of its border management and enable targeted policy development and implementation in the future.”
To maintain Canadian permanent residency, a person must be in Canada for at least two years within a five-year period. Many so-called “phantom immigrants,” who land here and return to their home country, often cheat the system by leaving and returning to Canada through the U.S. land border.
And when they apply for Canadian citizenship, which requires them to be physically present for at least three years or 1,095 days over the previous four years, there’s no record of their absence in Canada.
With the extension of the data collection to Canadian citizens, Kurland said the policy implication will be even more far-reaching since the applications of laws such as income taxes and health-care eligibility are built upon residency, which has traditionally been hard to track and enforce.
Officials will now have the tool to go after Canadians who claim to be non-residents in Canada to avoid paying income taxes but yet have spent more than 182 days in the country to meet the threshold, said Kurland.
Many provinces also impose a three-month wait for health care and a person loses coverage after an extended period of absence, he added.
Torstar News Service
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