I can start talking about performance measurement.
In the 2011 audit, I recall that the previous audit on toxics indicated or proposed that we didn't do a good job measuring the effectiveness or what impact our compliance promotion and enforcement activities had.
We took that on board and we put quite an extensive pilot project in place to answer the question of what difference our compliance promotion and enforcement activities actually make.
In the most recent toxics report, I know one of the criticisms was on how many inspections focused on the PERC regulations, but that was actually quite deliberate. The PERC regulations deal with tetrachloroethylene, which is a very toxic substance used in dry cleaning. It's a hydrocarbon, it's toxic to the environment, and if it's not handled properly, it can contaminate our groundwater.
The other thing I should mention is that we had low compliance rates in the dry cleaner community. Typically, there were key issues in that they were just not complying with our regulations.
We put a test in place that involved establishing a baseline period, so we determined current compliance rates. We set a target. We wanted to see a 10% increase in compliance as a result of our compliance promotion activities and our enforcement interventions.
We had our baseline period, when my enforcement colleagues did a blitz of inspections. They determined what our compliance rate was at a point in time. Next, we had compliance promotion experts, who are people who specialize in providing information to regulated communities about how they have to comply with our regulations, and they focused on the dry cleaners and explained to them what their obligations were under our PERC regulations. They did that in a blitz as well, so there were very targeted efforts.
We looked at the community in which English and French were not usually the mother tongues, so we produced materials in a range of other languages. There was a period of compliance promotion, and then we had inspectors go back to do a blitz of inspections to see if we had moved the needle on compliance rates.
In the end, we found that we had and that the inspections and the compliance promotion blitz had an impact. We went from 51% compliance to 62% compliance. It was definitely an improvement, although 62% is still not great.
As the report noted, we are still focusing on that community to make sure they are complying with our regulations.
That's one example of how we have addressed a very specific recommendation about assessing our effectiveness.
If there is time I can ask Heather, my colleague in enforcement, to talk about—