Airport Security?

On Jan. 2, I was in Canada, about to fly back to the United States. This wouldn’t normally be a problem, except that on Dec. 25, just seven days earlier, a man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to blow up a plane flying from Amsterdam to Detroit with an explosive hidden in his underpants. Back home, reactions ranged from the reasonable to the hysterical.

Conservatives criticized the Obama administration for not doing enough to prevent the (failed) attack. The criticisms eventually got as ridiculous as former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino’s allegation that the United States did not suffer a significant terrorist attack during George W. Bush’s presidency. (I thought it was "9/11—Never Forget"?) Countries around the world, including the United States, began to debate the use of new body-scanning machines that many politicians and national security experts believe could have prevented the attempted Christmas Day bombing.

So as I began to make preparations to fly back, our friendly neighbor to the north’s transportation ministry banned carry-on luggage. Since Abdulmutallab didn’t secrete his explosive in his carry-on luggage, it may not be immediately clear why Transport Canada judged banning carry-on luggage to be a reasonable response.

In practice, Canadian security agents were simply overwhelmed. Following the attempted attack, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration required all passengers on flights into the United States to be patted down and have their carry-on luggage hand-searched. Canada sends more international flights to the United States than anywhere else every day, and these new security measures caused chaos. At Canada’s busiest airport, Pearson International Airport in Toronto, passengers had wait times in security lines up to seven hours long.

On Dec. 28, just days before I planned to board my flight back home, Transport Canada announced that only certain excepted personal items—purses smaller than 9×11 inches, laptops (by themselves, not in bags), musical instruments, infant-care items, and medical/special needs items—would be allowed in the passenger area of planes bound for the United States.

This measure reduced the lines at security checkpoints (though Transport Canada is, with good reason, still recommending that travelers arrive at the airport three hours before a U.S. flight), but it did nothing in particular to ease the general atmosphere of chaos that now surrounds flying from Canada to the United States. Despite knowing about the new policies ahead of time (which many people didn’t), it took some scrambling and persistent reclarification when I arrived at the Vancouver airport to finally be able to figure out what I was allowed to carry on the plane and what I wasn’t. No, I couldn’t bring my laptop on the plane in my messenger bag, but I could carry it in a neoprene sleeve. No, I couldn’t leave the books, camera, and other small miscellaneous possessions in my messenger bag, but I could transfer them to a plastic shopping bag, call it my "purse," and take all those things through security and onto the plane.

By the time I got through the gate, I noticed that there seemed to be considerable inconsistency in how the rules were enforced—and according to media reports that seems still to be the case. On my flight, there were women with purses larger than my forbidden messenger bag; despite some hysteria in the Canadian media about whether the new policies mean that books are now prohibited on planes, I was able to bring two. If Transport Canada’s new policy is being enforced this inconsistently and with this little clarification, it’s enough to cause one to wonder what—other than paying lip service to compliance with the TSA’s requirements—the point of having this policy is in the first place.

This is not to say that all of Transport Canada’s and the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority’s new security measures were this absurd. This trip was the first time flying out of Canada that I’d been patted down or had my plastic-bag-with-books-in-it hand-searched. Such heightened security has been common practice on flights to the United States from other countries for a while now. (By way of comparison, I was subjected to just such repeated and careful screening when returning from a trip to Russia in 2006.)

At the very least, there appears to be an underlying logic behind searching passengers more carefully or strategically, while inconsistently banning carry-on bags seems neither careful nor strategic—especially since the two-carry-on policy that has been in place for the past several years does not appear to have resulted in a heightened incidence of explosives secreted in backpacks or laptop bags on Canadian flights. Transport Canada’s reaction may have come out of panic at seven-hour-long lines, but now that it’s been a couple weeks, it may be time to rethink this particular policy.

Thinking more broadly, it may even be time to rethink how we—Canadians and Americans alike—conceive of aviation security and respond to threats toward it. I heard many fellow passengers on short-haul flights into the United States express a disinclination to repeat the experience anytime soon. Many of the flights between the United States and Canada are commuter flights—think Montreal to Boston, or Vancouver to Seattle, or Toronto to Detroit. The passengers that flew that day with me may instead opt for other, less stressful methods of traveling across the border: Some may choose to drive or, where it’s an option, take the train.

A constant state of heightened security isn’t as practical on commuter flights as it is in the case of long-haul overseas international flights (like the fateful one from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day), and it’s a fairly bizarre double standard. Say I traveled for business regularly between Montreal and Boston—why should I be able to take my luggage with me on Amtrak, but not on a commuter flight? The terrorist attacks on subways in the UK in 2004 and Spain in 2005 suggest to us that a threat of a bomb on a train is no less credible than a threat of a bomb on an airplane, yet no one is talking about creating a special set of security protocols to ride Amtrak or the subway systems in major cities.

Unfortunately for travelers, the Transport Canada policy seems likely to stay in place for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the fact that I neither own a car nor have the time to drive across the country means that if I want to visit my family in Canada, I’ll have to transfer my possessions to a plastic shopping bag before I board my flight from Vancouver to Newark. But expect a lot of commuters to begin to reconsider flying regularly across the 49th parallel—and perhaps those who would like to harm the United States (or Canada) will become more convinced that a surefire way to induce panic and hysteria is to attempt to attack the air transportation system.

Emily is a staff writer for Campus Progress. She attends Princeton University.

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