Transport Minister John Baird says 12 full-body scanners will begin to arrive in Canadian airports this week. The other 36, he says, will arrive over the next five to 10 weeks.
Speaking on CTV’s Question Period yesterday, Mr. Baird tried to resolve some of the confusion around airport security amid the Christmas Day bombing attempt on an American airliner bound for Detroit.
His defence, however, of the so-called “intimate” pat down of a tiny, 85-year-old woman at the Ottawa airport recently – it garnered headlines in The Ottawa Citizen as the woman felt "terrified" by the search – has caused a bit of a buzz.
“Well, I don’t want ... government security officers saying, ‘well because you’re, in your words [referring to the interviewer], a Caucasian woman, we won’t search you,” he said. “I guess the reality is, as we’ve seen in Iraq, the al-Qaeda network has put explosive devices on developmentally disabled adults and sent them into marketplaces where their bombs were detonated.”
Some observers are linking Mr. Baird’s statement to a story last year in The New York Times disputing the terror network’s use of mentally disabled female suicide bombers. The story says that psychiatric case files of two women who killed nearly 100 people in Baghdad last year “show that they suffered from depression and schizophrenia but do not contain information that they had Down syndrome.”
There was a belief initially that the women were mentally handicapped and “unwitting victims of insurgents,” according to the story.
Meanwhile, the Transport Minister also spoke about the security rules involving children. He said that children under 18 will be subject to a mandatory pat down. They will not have to go through a full-body scanner.
He also suggested that these security rules are in place because the Americans could prohibit Canadian planes from landing in the United States if they felt our security was not robust enough.
“They could say, ‘listen, if you don’t want to undertake these new security measures, we’d rather you didn’t fly into New York, we’d rather you didn’t fly into Washington,” he said.
Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, speaking to Dalhousie University students in Halifax today, also touched on the challenges of airline security.
“We don’t want to get into racial profiling,” he said. “We don’t want two lines.” However, he did say that there should be a “national discussion” on how far Canadians are willing to go when it comes to security.
Reports today, however, are that the airports are quiet as the holiday season is coming to an end.
