Immigration.ca - Canada Immigration News - March 2010
The Canadian Government is planning to introduce new electronic passports as soon as 2011.
The "e-passports", will contain a chip that digitally stores photo and personal information. Passport Canada says that the electronic version will be more secure than the current passport documents, as they will be more difficult to forge or tamper with.
However, critics are concerned that the e-passports will actually become less secure in terms of protecting individuals from identity theft. They say that the government has not sufficiently proven the security of the new passports, nor even shown evidence of testing.
"I am not reassured that the passport office has adequately addressed the many concerns," said Andrew Clement, a professor at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information.
Despite the concern, the government is moving forward and the next step will be consultations with the Canadian Public. In the next month, Passport Canada will launch a "major online consultations" to see what Canadians think about the services being offered. They will use the information gathered from these consultations to determine a more precise timeline and cost estimate for the e-passport.
Passport Canada has noted that it may be falling behind, as all other G7 nations already have implemented e-passport systems. The department is also looking at embedding fingerprints and iris scans in the passports, but for now is holding off on implementation because of the privacy issues involved.
There are already approximately 25,000 Canadian e-passports being used in a pilot project, with “no difficulties” reported since January of 2010, according to a spokesperson at the Passport Canada office.
Source: Victoria Times Colonist
