The Auditor General addressed that question in 2008 and identified what she felt were deficiencies in early detection and rapid response. One of the reasons why Transport, and Fisheries and Oceans, were willing to provide new money for our research network was to specifically address those objectives, so we're doing the best we can with the resources we have available to us.
As I mentioned, given the expense of trying to run some of these analyses, we're restricted in terms of how intensively we can sample. Ideally I'd like to sample 15 ports in the Great Lakes, but we only have funding to sample three on the Great Lakes and one on the St. Lawrence River.
We're using state-of-the-art approaches. Currently, we're the only group in the world that is doing this in an orchestrated fashion. I have colleagues in the United States who are doing this piecemeal. One colleague at Wayne State University in Detroit is sampling the port of Toledo, Ohio, and is using some of the knowledge we've gained to help his study, but he's only sampling one port.
We would like to see a comprehensive, collaborative approach by both the U.S. and Canada as part of this early detection program. Once our sampling of these 16 ports is done, we don't have sufficient funding to go back and resample. We did 14 last summer; we're doing two more in the Arctic this year.
It's not going to be by us, but we ought to have periodic, systematic sampling of key ports throughout Canada. You can't sample all ports, but you would target the ports that you perceive to have the highest risk of new invaders, and then you would go back every five years and resample, and then compare your previous results with your new results to see whether or not you have new invaders.