OTTAWA — Passport Canada is looking to introduce ePassports in 2012 and held a Tourism and Travel Passport Services Roundtable Event to explain and solicit input.

ACTA attended the event representing its more than 2,200 travel agency members and our allied members but said the meeting was held under the Chatham House Rule which states that neither the affiliation nor the identity of the speakers may be revealed.

Canada’s ePassport is scheduled for release in 2012 following the lead of 70 other countries, including the EU.

An ePassport contains an electronic chip which can record various things about the bearer. In Canada’s case, the ePassport will look almost identical with the passports we now have except for a small symbol on the cover denoting that it is an electronic document. The digital chip is embedded in the back cover of the passport and will not be visible. In Canada’s case, this chip will contain only the information which is now readable on Page 2 of the current passport.

The big difference is that the chip will contain a copy of the photograph in the passport and that photo will be scannable by face recognition software. Face recognition is used by all countries using the ePassport while some of these nations also include ID such as fingerprints.

Canada will rely only on face recognition. Basically, a scan of a person’s face will register on a graph precise measurements of things like the distance between the eyes of the subject. Each person’s face is as unique as a fingerprint.

Information on the passport can be captured and even stored by other nations; there is no international convention preventing or even limiting another nation’s use of information captured from the passport and, in the future, the ePassport, said ACTA.

A key point for the travel industry is that ePassport will be issued for 10 years instead of the current five years in Canada. Most other nations issue their ePassports for 10 years but a few provide options such as an old-style passport issued for five years. Britain’s ePassport is now issued for 10 and a half years to cover the period of six months before expiry that can bar travel to some countries.

However, Canada may continue to issue an old-style passport good for five years after release of the new ePassport in 2012. There was a strong suggestion at the roundtable that Passport Canada not provide this option in addition to a 10-year document – which would be driven mainly by politics and not by any real need to offer the five-year option.

Children will have passports with much shorter terms. For instance, very young children may get passports good for three years because of the change in the structures of their faces and because guardianship and parental issues may arise. There is a suggestion that children would remain listed on their parent’s ePassport until the child is 18 to reduce cost of producing ePassports for younger children.

From other information, ACTA knows that Passport Canada actually loses money on each passport it prints. Passport Canada is a government agency but it operates on a cost-recovery model. This means the agency gets no funding from government and must pay for all its operations out of the revenues it receives from selling passports to Canadians. As well, the government takes $25 out of the revenue for each passport and deposits it in the government’s general revenues, even though the government claims it is putting these funds into ‘consular services’. Consular services are responsible for helping Canadians abroad including repatriating Canadians stranded abroad by natural calamities, business failures and other causes.

At the roundtable, Passport Canada’s top echelon made it clear it is looking for ways to produce more revenue. The agency would be willing to consider partnerships, advertising opportunities such as including commercial information in passport mailouts, and so on.