PUBLICATION:  Montreal Gazette
DATE:  2003.10.07
EDITION:  Final
SECTION:  News
PAGE:  A17
BYLINE:  LOUISE ELLIOTT
SOURCE:  CP
DATELINE:  OTTAWA

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ID card plan to top $7 billion, report says: 'Conservative estimate,'
watchdog group director says
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The cost of Immigration Minister Denis Coderre's proposal for a national
identity card would top $7 billion, says a new report to a Commons
committee
- a finding that makes the $1-billion national gun registry look like
chump change.

And the amount, based on estimates for a similar project in Great
Britain, will probably be considerably higher, said the director of the
U.K.-based international watchdog that wrote the report.

"We have given the most conservative possible estimates," said Simon
Davies, director of Privacy International and a visiting fellow at the
London School of Economics.

Worse, Davies argues, the costs of the plan, which would see
fingerprints or iris scans of Canadians encoded on ID cards, are
"guaranteed high-risk, no return.

"There's no evidence that there will be ... anything of value to the
security of the country."

The citizenship and immigration committee, which is set to release an
interim report of its own today summarizing a deluge of negative
findings, met with Davies's group in London last spring.

Its estimated price tag tops the $5 billion put forward by interim
federal privacy commissioner Robert Marleau, who also recommended
against the card.

That's partly because Marleau didn't account for the cost of a parallel
backup system, Davies said.

"The cost of the ID card system, together with appropriate registration
procedures, IT infrastructure, private and public sector compliance and
parallel systems will be well in excess of informal estimates currently
circulating," the report says.

Coderre has never provided a cost estimate for the project.

Opposition members of the committee said the high price tag is just one
more indication of the futility of Coderre's plan.

The report is based on 14 years of research in several countries that
have tried to implement such systems, including New Zealand, Australia
and China.

It notes China has withdrawn fingerprints from its ID card system in the
past month because the system is not workable.

Alliance immigration critic Diane Ablonczy said the database would be
"just a big money pit."