From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The Department of Immigration commissioned a pollster to ask Canadians how comfortable they would be with a ‘digital version’ of their passport, despite multiple parliamentary committees having rejected any sort of national ID system.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s immigration ministry has been secretly asking Canadians via surveys if they would accept a mandatory national identification program that likely would require each citizen to always have a type of “digital” passport on them.

Canada’s Immigration Minister Marc Miller’s department, as reported by Blacklock’s Reporter, commissioned a company called Advanis Inc., an Ontario-based pollster, to poll Canadians on its “Passport Client Experience Survey.” This poll has been ongoing since December of last year, with pollsters targeting “clients who applied for a passport.”

The main question the poll asked was, “How comfortable would you be sharing a secure digital version of the passport within Canada as an identity document?”

Thus far, the Department of Immigration has not commented about its poll.

The poll comes despite multiple parliamentary committees having rejected numerous times any sort of national ID system, noting how such a system would be extremely costly.

One of Canada’s former privacy commissioners, Robert Marleau, in a 2003 report titled “Why We Should Resist A National ID Card For Canada,” called any type of national ID card “the most significant privacy issue in Canadian society.”

“A national identification card would require an elaborate and complex national identity system with database, communications networks, card readers, millions of identification cards and polices and procedures to address a myriad of security, privacy, manageability, and human factor considerations. The costs associated with such a system would be enormous. Just creating it could cost between $3 billion and $5 billion with substantial additional costs to operate it,” he observed.

When it comes to a national digital ID system, as reported by LifeSiteNews last week, a briefing note from members of Trudeau’s cabinet claims that a national digital ID system is “easier” and “securer” than traditional identification but insists it will remain “optional.”

The contents of the briefing note come after federal regulators previously disclosed they are working on digital credentials for Canadians despite the fact that MPs have repeatedly rejected the proposal over safety concerns, as reported by LifeSiteNews.

Digital IDs and similar systems have long been pushed by globalist groups like the World Economic Forum under the guise of ease of access or security.

However, critics have warned that with a “digital ID, there is no public consensus, only collusion,” and that the purpose of such a system is to eliminate “choice” in favor of “coercion and contradiction to confuse our cognition towards total control.”

The Conservative Party has repeatedly warned Canadians about “mandatory digital ID” systems. While the Trudeau government insists this program will be optional, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has promised to introduce a new bill that would “expressly prohibit” digital IDs in Canada.

Poilievre is also opposed to a federal digital dollar, plans for which are currently on hold.