Pursuant to notice of May 29, 2025, moved:

That the Senate call on the Government of Canada to investigate the creation of a sovereign, domestic Verified Travellers Program for Canadians.

She said: I hope you will all join me in supporting this modest but urgent motion. Please allow me to explain.

Anyone who uses Canadian airports is familiar with this scene: A very long line of passengers are waiting to go through airport security. Why is the line so slow? In part, it’s because passengers going through screening have to stop to pull their laptops from their bags or briefcases, and then place them in their own special trays for inspection. Then they have to put the tiny bottles of shampoo and tiny tubes of toothpaste into tiny little plastic bags and place them on trays for inspection.

They must take off their hoodies, cardigans and suit jackets. If they are wearing boots that go ever so slightly above the ankle, they have to take them off and complete the screening process standing on the cold airport floor in their socks in the hopes they didn’t absentmindedly put on a pair with holes. If they have a medical piece of equipment, such as a CPAP machine, then that needs to be pulled out and put into a separate tray, too.

Some of these measures may be essential; others may simply be security theatre, a holdover from the panic post 9/11. As good, polite Canadians, we line up and go through the ritual.

While passengers wait in the long lines, hopping about in their sock feet, they can’t help but look over at the lucky verified travellers whisking their way through the short, swift verified traveller line where people can leave their computers in their cases, their toothpaste in their toiletry bags, their cardigans buttoned up and their boots on their feet.

Why do verified travellers receive this premium speedy treatment? It’s because they have gone through a series of background security checks in advance. They are pre-screened to determine they are not terrorists, hijackers or other kinds of threats.

As you stand there in the slow line, you may be wondering, “How do I become a verified traveller? How do I get to be so special?”

There are, in fact, four classes of Canadians who get to use the “good line” at the airport. The first is serving members of the Canadian Armed Forces, including reservists. The second is RCMP members, as well as most members of provincial and local police forces. The third category is pilots, flight attendants and other air crew members in uniform, as well as any airport employees who carry a special Restricted Area Identity Card, or RAIC.

However, if you are not a soldier, police officer, pilot or passenger agent, there is still only one way for you, as a Canadian, to become a verified traveller: You can apply for a NEXUS card. NEXUS is a joint American-Canadian program that lets us cross more easily into the United States. It’s ideal for people who do a lot of cross-border business or who work in both countries. Applicants have to go through a security background check and in-person interviews conducted by both the Canada Border Services Agency and U.S. Homeland Security.

Quite a few of us in this chamber have already jumped through the necessary hoops, paid the necessary fees and waited ages for American approval.

But it is not a simple process, especially now.

During the first Trump presidency, when COVID hit, the entire NEXUS system ground to a halt, creating wait times of years to obtain a card. Then the U.S. tightened its interview rules. Canadians used to be able to go to any major international airport, such as those in Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Toronto and Halifax, to be interviewed by American border officials. You didn’t need to fly to the United States; you could just come to the airport. That is no longer the case.

You can still go to a major international airport for a security check, but now you must buy a ticket and fly to a destination in the U.S. before you can be interviewed.

At a time when many Canadians are feeling leery or queasy about visiting Trump’s America, or are simply boycotting it for political reasons, forcing someone to buy a ticket to the United States just so they can get NEXUS approval seems a bit unfair.

Your other option is to drive across the border to complete an interview. That isn’t so hard, to be honest, if you live in Vancouver, Montreal or Ottawa, but it’s a lot more complicated if you live somewhere like Edmonton, from which it takes six and a half hours to drive to the nearest border crossing, in Sweet Grass, Montana.

Travel logistics aside, getting an appointment for an interview isn’t easy. When I spoke to the CBSA a few months ago, they acknowledged that there were more than 100,000 Canadians waiting for appointments at American border posts.

The process is even more complicated for francophones. Although all U.S. application forms are available in English, Spanish and French, it could be harder to arrange an interview in French with U.S. border agents, especially outside Quebec.

This is what the Canada Border Services Agency told my office about the possibility of pre-booking an interview with CBSA and Homeland Security officers who do speak French:

The option to select to do the interview in either of the two official languages is dependent on operational capacity and the availability of interviewing officers. There is no possibility to pre-select the language of your choice, officers will do their best to accommodate when possible.

Nor is that the only issue. For many Canadians, the very idea of submitting to vetting from Trump’s Homeland Security apparatus — of providing the Trump regime with their fingerprints and retinal scans — is more than a little disquieting.

And then in August, a new problem came to light. Due to the Trump government’s policies against trans people, new NEXUS cards cannot use an “X” to mark someone’s gender. They can only use either “F” for female or “M” for male, and that letter must now match the gender a person was assigned at birth.

Those currently using a NEXUS card marked with an “X” can continue to use it for now, but when that card expires, they can only get a renewal if they revert to using the letter that marked their former gender. For trans, Two-Spirit, gender-fluid or gender non-binary Canadians, that may mean a NEXUS card is simply out of reach.

Canadian courts have affirmed that gender identity is a protected ground in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and yet, in order to conform to American bigotry, Canada’s only verified traveller program now actively discriminates against any Canadian who doesn’t fit into the neat gender binary. That, to my mind, amounts to a Charter violation.

And yet we have no option. It doesn’t matter if you’re a cabinet minister, diplomat, senator, lieutenant governor, Supreme Court justice, archbishop or just a very frequent flyer. This isn’t just an issue for business executives or political elites. If you fly a lot — whether that’s to visit your aged parents, your new grandkids, your long-distance lover or your favourite holiday spot — and want to go through the express line, you need Donald Trump’s say-so. It makes no sense, especially since the vast majority of people who apply for NEXUS cards are Canadians and many of them, frankly, want to use their card to fly more easily within Canada.

The Canadians Border Services Agency briefed my office about the matter this summer. We heard that Canadian applications for NEXUS cards started dropping noticeably last November, right after Trump’s second election. It’s hard to imagine seeing that trend reversing any time soon, and that’s a problem for Canadian airports. Without enough verified travellers in the queue, airports can’t dedicate the staff to keep the verified traveller lanes open.

Already, Ottawa’s airport only opens its verified line during limited peak hours. The Canadian Airports Council has been lobbying for years for a made-in-Canada domestic verified traveller card, and now the council warns that if we don’t have enough verified travellers, the fast lanes may close and security wait times will increase for everyone.

Why do we still rely on a country which has threatened our sovereignty to investigate our citizens and collect and retain their private and biometric information just so that we can transit through Canadian airports?

It’s not just gender-queer Canadians who are at risk of exclusion. What if the Trump government just doesn’t like your politics, your social media posts, your religion or your skin tone? Why have we surrendered to another country complete authority to determine which Canadians can be trusted to travel within our own borders?

Maybe you don’t think you need a NEXUS card. Canadians have, after all, dramatically reduced their travel to the United States since Trump’s annexation threats. But if you want to fly from Edmonton to St. John’s and leave your boots on, you must show a NEXUS card.

If you want to fly from Montreal to Paris without taking your toothpaste out, you need a NEXUS card. Is that really necessary? Why?

The CBSA already carries out its own parallel background checks in order to issue NEXUS cards, so I must ask this question: What is preventing Canada from issuing its own domestic trusted traveller cards to Canadian frequent flyers who have no plans to visit the United States and simply wish to fly domestically or overseas with less fuss and bother?

Since the CBSA is already doing the background checks and interviews in both official languages, surely it couldn’t be so hard to stand up a sovereign, domestic verified travellers program for Canadians, both francophone and anglophone, that doesn’t require Uncle Sam’s blessing.

I have spoken with both the CBSA and Transport Canada to ask them those very questions. To be honest, the problem seems to be simply one of bureaucratic, legalistic logistics — figuring out how to transfer the necessary data from one department to the other.

Of course, as unelected senators, we cannot compel the government to spend money on a new, made-in-Canada trusted traveller program. But I think we are well within our rights to ask that the government investigate the practicality and viability of setting up such a program, not to mention the national security and Charter risks in failing to do so.

It is well past time for us to repatriate control of our airport screening systems and stop contracting out our national security assessments to an increasingly unpredictable and unreliable foreign power.

It may cost a bit more, but it will be worth every penny for us to reclaim our national sovereignty, to ensure that every trusted Canadian has the equal right and equal opportunity to access a card and to ensure that our airports run as smoothly and efficiently as possible, to the benefit of Canadian travellers and the Canadian economy.

Honourable colleagues, I hope I can inspire some of you to address this issue and I hope that we can then put this motion to a vote.

Let’s tell the government that we want something better and fairer: a made-in-Canada verified traveller program that respects our language rights, our civil rights and our national sovereignty.

Thank you, hiy hiy.