In Depth

Graham Kee: The Mediator

To get the job done at a major seaport, Graham Kee convinces dozens of competing stakeholders that collaborating on security helps everyone succeed

By Sarah D. Scalet

"You're filling out this form, and you're putting down a lot of personal information," Kee says. "If you know exactly what [the government] does with the information, if you know what laws are there to prevent them from doing this or that with the information, if you know what their policies are, then you feel a lot better. I want to make sure that everybody who has to go through the background check understands what happens to that information."

On this day, even Kee didn't know what would happen to the information. He was gearing up for a day of meetings with Transport Canada, where he and other stakeholders were going to get more information about the program.

To read some of the news articles about resistance to the checks, you might think that a strike is imminent. But to hear Kee talk, his contingency plan for a labor stoppage is already in place, and it is going pretty well, thank you very much. "I'm not going to implement any program that's going to fail, so my contingency is already started, to make sure that this program is successful," he says. "That's by inclusion, that's by communication, and that's by proper implementation. The failure of the contingency plan is a strike."

The question of failure or success will be answered by autumn. Several months from now, according to Kee's plans, there will be another tiny bit of information on that white ID card. Background check passed? Yes/no. If the cardholder needs to have had the check done, and if the cardholder passed that check, then the right gate will go up. It'll be just another door carefully opened by Graham Kee, with a little help from a lot of other people.

Other stories by Sarah D. Scalet

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