We're victims of 'security overkill'
Tom Claridge
One of the more astute observations made in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon was that life would never be the same again.

That was obviously going to be the case in spots like New York City and Washington, and even elsewhere in the United States. But it wasn't so obvious to a lot of us living north of the U.S. border.

Yet today, few Canadians would fail to notice that they face a lot more security measures, and not just when they take a flight somewhere.

Perhaps the most obvious change facing Canadians is what they've begun to encounter when they plan to take a trip south.

If they want to go by air, a passport has already become a necessity of life, and getting one is presenting hurdles never before encountered, the main one being a Canadian Passport Office that clearly is incapable of doing its job properly.

On a personal note, wife Pam and I, as well as daughter Nancy, decided last fall that it would be a good idea to get new passports to replace ones that had long since expired. But since at that point we didn't have any particular travel plans, we put off getting passport photos until shortly before Christmas, and it was late January before Pam and I finally got around to mailing the passport applications, and even later that Nancy followed suit.

You might recall all the stories in mid-January about how badly backlogged the Passport Office had become, with the time required to get a passport running to somewhere between 60 and 90 days unless you paid a lot extra for special service.

Well, in late February Nancy checked with the Passport Office only to be told there was no record of the application having arrived from Canada Post, and it seemed that possibly it had somehow been lost.

However, they did promise to investigate the matter, and to her immense delight the new passport arrived a few weeks later, and as a result she recently was able to make plans for a week-long visit to Paris.

Seems complaining can have its benefits.

As for her parents' applications, the latest word from the passport bureaucrats came in the form of notice from MasterCard that our payment had been debited! As of late last week, we still had no other indication that they had started to work on applications filed in late January.

Thankfully, we have no current travel plans and can only drool at some of the spring specials turning up in the weekend travel sections. However, it still seems ridiculous that a process which took about 10 days and cost about $50 when we last applied in 2000 now costs more than 50 per cent more and in all likelihood will take roughly 10 times as long, thanks to the new border security measures imposed by Washington, D.C.

Of course, heightened security is found in places other than airports and border crossings.

Take, for example, the changes we've seen in new cars produced since the mid-1990s.

As someone who has owned a car since 1958, I've never worried too much about leaving it unlocked and in all those years have never had one stolen. And it's only in the last few years that I've opted for a vehicle with keyless entry.

On the other hand, I have had my wallet stolen (once while swimming at Orangeville's Tony Rose arena) and when renting a car have routinely worried about losing the key or finding it had been left in the locked vehicle. As a result, I had traditionally made a point of getting copies of both the family car's and any rental car's keys, figuring the $2-or-so cost was a reasonable outlay.

But now, thanks to the industry's heightened security concerns (or perhaps just a desire to monopolize the key-cutting trade), getting a spare key is an enormous and expensive task.

And for some reason, new cars that once came with three keys (two for the owners and one for a valet) now turn up with just two, "non-copyable" keys, and the cost of getting a third can be anywhere up to $200.

A few weeks ago, I decided it would be a good idea to get a spare for the new family car, a Hyundai Elantra, so that all three drivers in the household would have a key of their own.

What sounded relatively simple turned out to be anything but, and I wound up concluding that the charge (well under $200) was reasonable in the circumstances.

I had somehow thought all the dealer would have to do was take one of our two keys, cut a new one from a blank and program the new key using software in the dealer's computer.

Instead, it turned out that Orangeville Hyundai not only needed both keys but had to requisition a special password and other information from Hyundai's head office - a process that seemed to take the better part of an hour.

In the end, a process that I'd thought would take just a few minutes took the better part of a morning.

I wonder whether I'm alone in seeing it as another form of "security overkill," and that at a minimum all new-car dealers ought to be equipped to provide the buyers with at least one spare key at the time of delivery, without needing help from head office.