Government Operations committee  The whole of the endeavour is criminal. The people who are smuggling people, even if they're—

Government Operations committee  Even if the people being smuggled are in some sense legitimate, the people smuggling them are rarely if anything but criminals. The proportion of economic refugees is probably the largest part of the flow. There are others involved in the flow who may be criminal or have other ch

Government Operations committee  Clearly the length of our border is a challenge if you're thinking in terms of smuggling across the border, but as I say, I think agencies have taken considerable steps to reduce that. The other reality for us is that to stop smuggling you really have to reach out into countrie

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chairman, there is an ongoing effort by border enforcement agencies to deal with people crossing the borders by walking over them or driving through border checkpoints, as has happened. That effort by the police, by enforcement on both sides of the border in fact, has borne c

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chairman, the problem of smuggling around the world is considerable. Canada is in some respects smaller than most other countries. If you visit some of the southeast Asian countries, the flows of people they have are in the hundreds of thousands and in some countries there ar

Government Operations committee  We have a total of about four officers, Mr. Chairman.

Government Operations committee  There are two of us, Mr. Chairman.

Government Operations committee  It varies between five and six. We go up and down occasionally, as we need an additional person for specific tasks.

Government Operations committee  We have a very small office. It varies between about five and six people. Virtually all of those people are in fact seconded from other departments and their salaries are absorbed by other departments. We have declined in the number of PCO dollars spent on salaries. We have one f

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chairman, in a sense it's a bit of a misnomer to say that it's an increase because the $1.1 million is the same budget we had previously, but it was expected earlier that this program would sunset, so there wouldn't be any expenditure in this year. In fact the program was con

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chairman, my total budget is about $12 million, so I can assure you I haven't given anybody $12 million. We've worked with a number of countries in terms of capacity-building in a variety of places to assist governments. Many governments in many countries have far less in ter

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think we've actually been quite effective in stopping it. There haven't been any arrivals since the Sun Sea. It's probably unwise to claim that we are entirely responsible for that, but we have some say in that happening.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The Australian situation unfortunately is very different from ours in the sense that the arrivals who are being smuggled into Australia by boat come in much smaller vessels from a much broader coastline. Indonesia is not very far away from northern Australia, and in particular, C

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, Mr. Chairman, I didn't quite say that. I said—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I've been in a number of countries working with countries to try to target the organizers of smuggling ventures—