Ten year passports

http://www.budget.gc.ca/2008/plan/chap4b-eng.asp under "Improving Canada's Borders"

I knew I'd read this somewhere, my MP helped me find it!

Basically as I understand (and bear in mind this could be subject to change legislatively before then), the Canadian Govt. is planning to implement passports that work in a similar way to EDLs and NEXUS cards, i.e. they will have RFID chips in them. These will be introduced in 2011 and will be valid for ten years. The reason it will take until 2011 is to get all the IT in place to do it, for example Alberta probably won't issue an EDL for budget reasons (not enough people crossing the border) so it will take time for places like Sweetgrass to get upgraded with the RFID technology.

So yes, CBP will be able to track when you leave the US because the RFID is linked into a database and both CBP and CBSA have access to it.

Until of course it gets closer to the implementation date and people go nuts about CBP having access to that information I suspect, although technically they've had access to it for years but it's spotty.

10 year passports would be nice. It's a bit of a pain to have to update a passport every 5 years from outside the country.

Yeah, the Americans, Europeans and many Asians already have these e-passports (passports with RFID chips in them). The US made it mandatory for countries to start issuing e-passports if they wanted to remain in the Visa Waiver program. I think this happened a few years ago. (This doesn't apply to Canadians of course, since Canada is not a VWP country.)

So basically Canada borders the US, but other countries have to have e-passports first. Hmm. Some of the EU countries seem to be taking advantage of this situation to put all kinds of police state stuff in their passports the US doesn't actually require.

I remember reading in the Federal Register that there was a date on which the US would require RFID-enabled passports, but they keep flip-flopping so I'm not sure what the date is now. Originally I think it was in 2014 but I think now it's October 26, 2016, which means if you have one of the last 5-year passports issued in Canada it will have expired by then.

And who wants to bet Canada won't issue any e-passports until midnight October 25, 2011?