October 4, 2006

Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative Update

TIAC Vice-President Chris Jones attended a briefing given by the US Embassy in Ottawa late last week.  The meeting coincided with the passage by the US Congress of the Homeland Security Appropriations Act.

The President is expected to sign this into law today.

Key points to note:

American residents traveling by the land and sea modes and entering the U.S. will be required to comply, at the latest, by June 1, 2009 with the documentation requirements of the WHTI. 

American travelers arriving in the US by the air mode however, will continue to have to meet the WHTI requirement by the earlier deadline of Jan 8, 2007.   This is thought to be relatively achievable as virtually all passengers traveling by air currently comply with the existing requirement to possess a passport.

As regards the extension accorded to the land and sea modes, it should be understood that DHS and the Department of State could still move the implementation date forward to any time between Jan 1, 2008 and June 1, 2009. Congress has urged them to implement the passport and pass card requirements at the earliest moment possible.  The exact date of implementation thus remains unknown but will likely coincide with the provision of the necessary card-reading technology/infrastructure to the land and sea points of entry.  In sum, once the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security have jointly certified that the specific security measures for travel documents are in place, the implementation for the land and sea modes must take place within three months.

The American government is assuming that the Canadian government’s Department of Foreign Affairs will continue to favor the passport as our travel document of choice.  Canadian visitors, we were assured, will continue to enjoy Visa-free travel in the United States.

As regards the four other key benchmarks that TIAC and the Passport Coalition have been seeking, their status is as follows:

• Accessible and affordable passport substitutes, such as REAL ID driver’s licenses that also include proof of citizenship
  US State Department officials regard this as still at the “conceptual stage” and seemed lukewarm about the likelihood of the REAL ID driver’s licenses happening anytime soon.  Given the multiplicity of state and provincial driver’s licenses and the potential cost and complexity of adding a “proof of citizenship” component to the cards, they did not evince optimism about this initiative.  They are willing,however, to monitor the pilot program that Washington State and British Columbia are inaugurating that involves the driver’s license document.

• An exemption for travelers aged under 16 years
  An alternative procedure will be found for children under the age of 16 who are traveling with properly documented adults.  However that procedure was not specified in the DHS Appropriations Act but will be done so in due course. The US government concedes that some degree of latitude must be found for the many children who come to Canada for the purposes of a hockey trip, museum visit etc.

• A U.S. government awareness campaign
  The US government has allocated a preliminary budget of $1 million for a public awareness campaign to promote the new travel document requirements to their own citizens.

• Expansion of NEXUS and FAST

NEXUS and FAST cards will be acceptable travel documents under the WHTI.  The US government continues to be supportive of these new travel documents and will devote more resources to rolling out the infrastructure to accommodate these documents at more land border and air points of entry in the near future.  They admit that their usage is fairly limited at this point in time, largely due to the lack of dedicated lane infrastructure.

Passports & New Passport Cards

A key additional reason for the briefing was to update Canadian stakeholders on the status of the new passport card that the US will shortly be issuing as an acceptable substitute for the passport.

Before describing that document, State Department officials gave a thumbnail sketch of the situation as it pertains to passports.  Currently, 70 million Americans have passports or roughly 27% of their population.  (This contrasts with Canada where 43% of our citizens possess passports.)  They expect that by 2014, 50% of the US population will have one.  They are currently receiving a deluge of applications for passports; in 2005 12 million passport applications were received by the US Passports Services Agency.  They are currently hiring more staff so as to be capable of processing 16 million travel documents annually.

The passport card will be cheaper ($50) than a passport ($97) and will be an acceptable proof of citizenship, nationality and identity. It will be a more portable, wallet-sized card that will have a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) component.  Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders  The purpose of an RFID system is to enable data to be transmitted by a mobile device, called a tag, which is read by an RFID reader and processed according to the needs of a particular application.

In the case of the new Passport Card, no data will be stored on the card.  In effect, the chip on the card will be a pointer to a data base stored on a DHS/Customs and Border Protection system which will contain the data on the individual being inspected.  This will be different from the current US passport which actually stores information on the chip itself.  The new cards will require the placement of gantries at border points to enable the vicinity-reading function required by the new cards. The new passport cards will build on the proximity/vicintiy-reading infrastructure of the NEXUS system to avoid the duplication of card reading systems.

The US thinks the new card will quickly become popular and will have a “positive travel facilitation impact.”  They expect to start issuing the cards by next summer (2007). 

The DHS Appropriations Bill requires that this technology be eventually shared with the Canadian and Mexican governments.

Summary

The extension of the implementation date for land and sea buys Canada time but is no cause for immediate celebration.  We must continue to encourage the US governments to devote substantial resources to publicizing the new travel document requirements to their citizens.  Informational circulars about the impending requirements should begin to be distributed at land, sea and marine points of entry and other venues at the earliest moment possible.