Letter of the day

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To The Editor:

Regarding "Provinces forge ahead with new licences" (April 3), Premier Shawn Graham made the right move when he canned a proposed "enhanced" driver's licence (EDL) card for the province.

Not only are the financial costs high, but there are unnecessary and potentially dangerous privacy risks to introducing the new high tech citizenship card where a simple passport would do the trick. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security set the technological standards for the EDL, which include a notoriously insecure radio frequency identification device (RFID) that will transmit a personal identification number to border officials, allowing them to access a central database in Ottawa containing all your information.

The RFID system chosen is more commonly used to track cattle and other consumer goods and can be intercepted surreptitiously by anyone with an off-the-shelf reader. A number of privacy, consumer and social justice organizations demonstrated just how easy that is at a public forum in Ottawa last month. That unique number is not random, as the Quebec and Ontario governments insist, but essentially the same as your SIN number, so anyone with a reader could tie it to you and begin to develop a profile.

Some might not see this as a big deal, but Canada's privacy commissioners have called the EDLs unnecessary and invasive, and a potential back door to a national ID card. This is because it's not really an "enhanced" driver's licence so much as it is another citizenship document connected to a new national database -- one that happens to also say you are of legal age to drive. The Saskatchewan government last month dropped its own EDL project because of concerns raised by its privacy commissioner.

The Council of Canadians, Consumers Council of Canada, Canadian Civil Liberties Association, la Ligue des droits et libertés, and the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group have demanded that the Harper government take these privacy concerns seriously and put an immediate moratorium on EDLs until Canadians can have an open debate about what we're getting into here.

New Brunswick made the right choice for one of several right reasons. Provincial EDLs are unnecessary considering the U.S. only requires we show a passport, which 75 per cent of adults have in Canada. There is no evidence they will speed up border crossing times considering most people will not get one, so all those cars in front of you will have to be processed the traditional way.

And they are costly at a time when the global economic crisis demands prudence from all levels of government.

Other provinces like Quebec, Ontario and B.C. should follow New Brunswick's and Saskatchewan's lead by scrapping their own EDL projects.

It's the only reasonable road to take.

Stuart Trew,

Trade Campaigner,

The Council of Canadians,

Toronto, Ont.