Yes, I can speak to that.
Since 1995 there's been a consular service fee, as you know, collected as part of the passport fee. It's $25 per passport. We're required by Treasury Board to report annually on the cost of consular service in relation to the fee, and the restriction, of course, is that the amount spent on services should never be less than the fee collected. If that were the case, we would have to look at the fee structure.
What we found, though, is that over the years the cost of delivering consular service actually exceeds significantly the amount that we collect. The balance of that is covered from the department's resources.
For example, in 2016-17 we collected $105 million in fees; however, we spent $131 million in delivering services. We foresee that trend continuing and that gap widening in the future.
There is no surplus in terms of what's been collected. In fact, it's quite the opposite.