Today is the first day of Ottawa’s new No-Fly list, and it has a bunch of people concerned.  Under the program, the government will compile names of people who pose “an immediate threat to aviation security” onto this list based on information supplied by CSIS and the RCMP.

Transport Minister Jean Lapierre has admitted that Canada’s effort will be quite modest in comparison to the programs in place elsewhere, such as the United States, but it has already raised alarms with some groups as Canadian cizitens have been mistakenly refused boarding for their flights.  As of this writing, Canada’s list is reportedly “fewer than 1,000 names”, whereas the U.S. counterpart has blossomed to more than 44,000.

The U.S. has used a no-fly list for a few years due to the 9-11 atacks in both Washington and New York.  When asked why Canada is still reviewing some security issues, the Transport minister replied that it had to do with legalities.  The government is not willing to implement any form of racial our country-of-origin profiling, which is a bonus, and according to a post I found on cbc.ca, there are three reasons a person may be placed on this list:

  • An individual who has been involved in a terrorist group and who, it can reasonably be suspected, will endanger the security of any aircraft or aerodrome, or the safety of the public, passengers or crew members
  • An individual who has been convicted of one or more serious and life-threatening crimes against aviation security
  • An individual who has been convicted of one or more serious and life-threatening offences and who may attack or harm an air carrier, passengers or crew members

Unfortunately, there is very little information about this list online for the moment.  I’m not really concerned whether I’ll be on this list at this point, but I do wonder what would happen if someone else with the same name was wanted for some felony.  Would I be prevented from leaving Canada?  I hope to be working in Japan before the end of this year, so could the actions of someone else put my employment in jeopardy?

I’d like the Canadian government to make the No-Fly list available to citizens in some online format.  It would naturally need to be secure, since we wouldn’t want to go to a site and see a list of a thousand people that couldn’t fly for whatever reason, but I would be willing to enter a secure https connection and enter some personal data such as my SIN and earnings from last year in order to get a Yes or No answer regarding my status.  This way, if my name did raise an alarm, I could get in touch with the proper authorities long before my flight is be slated to take off.