(Globe & Mail)
U.S. President George W. Bush has ordered a review of tough new rules
that would require returning Americans and visiting Canadians to carry passports or similarly secure identity documents, saying he feared massive disruption of traffic across the border.
"If
people have to have a passport, it's going to disrupt the honest flow of traffic," the President said yesterday in a question-and-answer session with the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
Mr. Bush's grasp of the policy seemed imperfect and his information apparently was gleaned from somewhat misleading news reports. So the President's off-the-cuff remarks may herald less of a policy review
than it might appear.
"I've talked to Condi," he said, referring to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, "and the Homeland Security people about seeing if there's some flexibility
in the law that will allow, for example, a finger imaging to serve as the so-called passport for daily traffic."
The proposed rules unveiled last week did not specify a passport but rather some
sort of secure identifier that included a biometric element, such as a fingerprint or an iris scan.
So the President's suggestion seems well within the scope of what the administration's policy
proposal includes.
Nevertheless, whether it is a fingerprint scan, a full passport or some sort of new border-crossing card, the new rules will mean an end to an era of easy crossing of the
U.S.-Canadian border, often with nothing more than a driver's licence for identification.
The President's worries, voiced yesterday, echoed the kind of criticism trade and tourism groups in all three
countries have made.
However, reducing the number of acceptable border-crossing documents to only a handful, rather than the thousands of variations of types of birth certificates now accepted as
proof of citizenship, will speed up trans-border flows, not create backlogs, State and Homeland Security officials said when they unveiled the proposed rules..
"When I first read that in the
newspaper about the need to have passports, particularly the day crossings that take place, about a million for instance in the state of Texas, I said, 'What's going on here?' " Mr. Bush said.
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