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Airport Shippers Police Themselves, Why Not Let Passengers Do the Same?

Calgary Herald - April 11, 2011

By Colin Kenny

Ask Prime Minister Harper what his government is doing about improving airline security and he’ll tell you that he just committed $95 million to ensure that cargo in the hold of passenger aircraft doesn’t explode.

What he won’t tell you is that nobody representing the Canadian people will be supervising cargo security – the $95 million is being doled out to shipping companies over the next five years in the hopes they will get their act together.

It’s been nearly a decade since 9/11, and despite repeated warnings the federal government has barely moved to fill the gaping hole in airline security that unscreened cargo represents. While passengers get shaken down at the front end of the airport, the same doesn’t apply to cargo loaded by commercial shippers.

Shipping companies fight it out in a highly competitive market with slim profit margins. Giving them money to handle their own screening is like handing every passenger in the waiting room $20 to screen themselves before getting on flights.

John Baird, the former transport minister, knows how loosey-goosey security is at the back end of Canadian airports – he and I actually made it onto to the tarmac of one big airport and actually boarded empty aircraft without the slightest impediment.

John Baird is very close to Stephen Harper, so Harper knows how big a gamble the government is taking in not stepping in and ensuring that all cargo is screened and that all workers with access to aircraft are searched every time they enter a secure area. None of this is happening.

Instead, after two years of study, the government comes up with a self-policing arrangement for shippers. This is similar to the system that brought us the tainted deli-meat crisis of 2008, after the federal government decided that meat producers – not government inspectors – should ensure the safety of their own products.

What is needed is a system whereby all cargo travelling on passenger flights passes through a central inspection facility, staffed by the government or security companies hired by the government. It shouldn’t take any more time for independent personnel to conduct rigorous inspections than companies themselves. 

Members of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence have hounded the government on the issue of airline security ever since 9/11, but this government has a way of waiting out criticism until the news media gets bored and moves onto another story.

They should not be ignoring the urgency with which that committee (in its non-partisan days) treated this issue. And they certainly shouldn’t be ignoring the advice of Mr. Justice John Major, who brought in a report this year after an exhaustive investigation of the explosion of Air India Flight 182 in 1985, which killed 329 people, most of them Canadians.

Last month Major spoke out about his deep disappointment at the government’s limp response to the recommendations of his report: “These commissions cost money . . . and the public are entitled to know whether [the government is] rejecting the report, what they’re going to do about it.”

Major is not alone at being upset – so are members of the Indo-Canadian community. But so far, not a peep from Mr. Harper or any of his ministers about what they’re going to do. Just an announcement that the lingering problem of inadequate baggage screening has been fobbed off to the people who haven’t previously seen the need to upgrade screening, despite the obvious danger that shadows every flight.

The government’s up front façade is impressive:  the stern passenger searches; the restrictions on liquids and aerosols; the body scans and the chemical swipes. But if the rigour of all this comforts some travellers, they should take a look behind the curtains, where rigour goes to die.