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A travelling parent with kids cannot take a 460-millilitre jar of peanut butter through airport security. It’s not an allergen issue, but rather it is too large: a spreadable food, treated like a liquid. But any number of containers of it less than 100 ml is OK.
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At one airport, a blazer comes off; at another, it stays on. The same thing with shoes and laptops, all according to the rules that can look arbitrary or capricious to onlookers.
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For Margaret Bloodworth, the former deputy minister of transport who helped manage Canada’s response on Sept. 11, 2001, that apparent regulatory mismatch is not entirely a design flaw.
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“In any human system, there’s going to be some inconsistencies,” Bloodworth said. And in airport security, she argues, the reality is that the machinery itself keeps changing: newer equipment can see things older equipment cannot, while smaller airports may not have the same technology as Toronto or Vancouver.
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Still, many travellers’ questions remain: Why must so much of flying now involve a hodgepodge ritual of belts, bins, scans, re-scans and Ziploc-ing bite-sized toothpaste tubes? It goes to the heart of how Canada built a modern security apparatus in a crisis, what trade-offs it accepted, and whether a system designed during an emergency has adequately distinguished genuine protection from permanent habit.
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Though the inconsistencies are real, so is the risk that a perfectly standardized system becomes perfectly learnable.
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“If you are predictable, then it’s dangerous,” said Jacques Duchesneau, the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority’s founding president and CEO, who led CATSA from 2002 to 2008. “If you are predictable, you are unsafe.”
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Security can look different from one airport or lane to another, because officials do not want a would-be attacker to know precisely what to expect, he told the Post.
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We’re saving lives
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- ‘THERE’S BEEN A TRAGEDY’: The untold history of Canada’s 9/11 response
- How Canada’s best-known 9/11 widow became a fierce advocate for terrorist victims
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“We’re not searching people,” he said. “We’re saving lives.”
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The post-9/11 system was born in a fog of fear, urgency and incomplete (at the time) information. Bloodworth, who later became national security adviser to then prime minister Stephen Harper, said that officials had to make urgent calls, with little certainty about the scale of the threat.
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“We really did know very little to begin with,” she said. “And yet had to make decisions, first of all to land planes, then what we do when we get them on the ground, and then when do we let them up, and on what grounds do we let them fly again?”
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David Collenette, then the federal transport minister, was one of the few people with statutory authority under the Aeronautics Act to issue the orders that grounded and redirected aviation traffic over Canada. He estimates that roughly 500 flights and 85,000 people were involved as aircraft were told not to proceed into the United States and, in many cases, to return across the Atlantic.