Canada's Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Denis Coderre recently announced that, rather than watching who enters the country, he would prefer to install a biometric control grid to track and trace everyone. His suggestion of "a national identity card with biometrics" earlier this year was followed up this past week by a forum apparently intended to lay out the rationale for the effort.

The forum seems not to have gone as smoothly as planned, however. Before it even started Coderre was dogged by accusations he had stacked the speaker deck, barring prominent anti-biometric Canadians from the dais and importing biometric proponent and alleged civil-liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz from the U.S.

An interim report issued this week by the Canadian Parliament's Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration wasn't exactly gung ho on the idea of a biometric national ID card either. Discussing the growing cross-pollination of databases, particularly between government agencies, the report pointed out: "If a national identity card contained various types of information . . . for example, a person’s health care record, driving abstract and employment history -- the impact on personal privacy would be substantial."

The report also took issue with a familiar police-state nostrum:

Witnesses also discussed the assertion that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from state officials demanding identity documentation, and that only criminals should worry about privacy intrusion. It was suggested that such a premise is flawed and that if carried to its logical extension would mean that the police should be allowed to enter our homes, read our mail or listen to our telephone calls at any time just to ensure that we are not breaking the law.

In the wake of the intellectual and verbal firestorm, Coderre attempted to appear as if he was softening his position, telling the conference, "Instead of replacing the many publicly issued documents with a single card, this approach would focus on improving what we already have." Coderre then added, according to the Canadian press wire service, that the status quo (i.e., no biometric databases) is "not an option."

This purportedly "softening" position should still raise a red flag, not only for Canadians, but for Americans as well. For just a week before the privacy conference, the Toronto Globe and Mail reported that the province of Manitoba "is considering incorporating biometric identification such as retinal scans and fingerprint data on driver's licence." (Canadian for "license.") Government Services Minister Scott Smith went on to tell the paper that other "ministers" (Canadian for "bureaucrats") are also looking at the plan -- 'We're looking at a system that is right across Canada.'

This brings us back to one of the first Privacy Villains highlighted in this space, the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA). It so happens that the AAMVA is made up of not only American DMV bureaucrats, but their canadian counterparts as well. The AAMVA's push for biometrics has included an explicit statement by its executive committee that drivers' licenses are and should be "de facto national identification cards."

So here we have a high-level bureaucrat dismissing arguments and obstinately calling for biometrics to be integrated onto existing documents, as a mid-level bureaucrat calls for integrating drivers' licenses into a national biometric identification system. Adding two and two here should leave the privacy-minded on both sides of the 49th Parallel with the realization that this isn't over, not by a long shot.

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