Thank you very much.
This is very important. This goes right to the heart of confidence in money as a store of value and a unit of account. I'm sure most are aware that we underinvested in banknotes in the previous decade, and, partly as a consequence of that, counterfeiting spiked up in Canada to unacceptably high levels.
It's a bit like inflation. Once you let this get away from itself, you have to work really, really hard to get it down. What the current governor and the bank put in place a few years ago was a three-pronged strategy, part of which is education, part of which is working with crown prosecutors to make sure it's prosecuted, and part of which is working with law enforcement. I said a three-pronged strategy, but I meant four-pronged, because the other prong is higher-quality banknotes, which the bank has introduced, as you've no doubt seen.
There has been a very sharp fall in counterfeiting. It's still too high, though. It's headed in the right direction, and we're going to drive it all the way down, and then we're going to keep doing that.
The RCMP has been extremely effective in this. I will tell you that the current governor and I met with the commissioner and the deputy commissioners of the RCMP just last week to talk about the next steps in this process.
This is important, but the message I'd like to leave with you is that we're making real progress on this. As a last point on accountability, we have these figures on our website to show where progress is being made.