Skip to main content
opinion

Reasonable people can disagree over the size of the state. Whatever its size, we want the state to be effective.

Despite a lot of anti-government rhetoric, many government programs are efficient. Some, however, are not. Although readers will cast mental votes for their favourite offenders, a case can be made that the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority should be a contender for this list.

CATSA is really not to blame for what it inflicts on air passengers. CATSA enforces the rules established by Transport Canada – rules that cause long lineups that would make any time-and-motion expert weep. Those lineups, the agency's bureaucracy and the Transport Canada rules would bring a smile to Osama bin Laden's lips, for his memory lives on daily in air transportation.

The rules are based on a maximum risk assessment for every passenger, which is a recipe for inefficiency and, one supposes, safety from some lawsuit about "profiling."

This maximum risk assessment explains why elderly women in wheelchairs or shuffling with canes are searched. Even their wheelchairs get patted down for explosive material, if you can believe it. Children in strollers get the full monty.

People with artificial joints – generally older people – are particularly targeted. They always get the full monty, too. Speaking of those scanning machines, how to explain that the same pair of shoes will cause no trouble at one airport but set off alarms at another airport, on the same day?

By way of contrast, Australia sets the machines lower, which means that many people pass easily through them. Every eighth or 10th passenger does get swabbed. In Germany, home of brilliant engineering, conveyor belts take the trays from one end to the other, whereas in Canada, it is CATSA people who do this work.

Even people carrying NEXUS cards (for which they have paid and passed security tests) are searched. They can be asked to remove their shoes, enter scanning machines, get patted down.

Speaking of NEXUS, both the United States and Canada do security checks on the same people, instead of recognizing each other's clearance. This means that getting a card takes six months or more. Renewing the card can mean going through the entire screening again, although this is in the process of changing.

In the United States, those with the Global Entry card – the rough international equivalent to NEXUS – can now zoom through dedicated lines. Having already been certified as no threat to the state, the holder goes into a special line where no shoes and belts are removed, no laptops leave briefcases, no coats are taken off. Only cellphones are placed in the tray. The result is fast movement for thousands of travellers.

Transport Canada, however, subjects NEXUS cardholders to the same scrutiny as all other passengers. When CATSA officials are asked why Canada does things that even the security-obsessed Americans don't, the reply is usually a shrug or a comment that "These are the rules." So they are, even though they make no sense.

Someone who sits at cabinet meetings remarked that ministers often grouse about the Transport Canada/CATSA rules, because cabinet ministers fly a lot. But they do nothing, presumably because they fear that if anything bad ever happened on their watch, the government would be blamed. Canadians have apparently become so accustomed to the CATSA performance that they don't complain very much.

A favourite example of the disjunction between those ministers and the real world of CATSA occurred when then-transport minister Chuck Strahl announced a forthcoming easing of some security rules. It was great news, except that simultaneously, selected passengers were being put through a new procedure in which they had to turn over their palms for swab tests in case they had recently been manufacturing bombs.

The fixation with air security – even at the tertiary airports with small planes where CATSA officials dutifully carry out Transport Canada rules – represents bureaucratic overkill. Anybody who wanted to kill a lot of people could find targets with as many people as airplanes – trains, bus stations, stadiums, shopping malls.

We don't subject any of these gathering places to the level of security we reserve for airlines, because of the memory of what happened in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, and episodic threats elsewhere since.

We are trapped in the past, without sensible judgment or risk assessment, having built a large, new bureaucracy whose rules are designed to be as rigid as possible, thereby mocking the idea of the efficient state.

Interact with The Globe