It has become increasingly challenging for us to balance Canadian export interests in military goods and technologies, as well as continuing to apply a rigorous risk-assessment framework using the criteria laid out in the Arms Trade Treaty to determine if a potential export of a Canadian military or strategic good could lead to any of the negative consequences in the Arms Trade Treaty that I referred to earlier, i.e., a risk that it would result in a violation of human rights, including serious acts of gender-based violence.
What we do to try to manage those two components of Canada's interests, both as an exporting nation and to ensure that we can continue to approach these export permits with a consistent, rigorous risk-assessment approach, if you will, is that we have regular dialogues through our various industry working groups. We speak to the companies themselves on a regular basis. We speak to the industry associations. We're in constant communication with companies to determine any additional information that we need to help make a determination as to whether that export permit should be approved.
At the same time, we've been trying to work with Canadian companies over the past two years to get them to be more compliant with the Arms Trade Treaty criteria and to work with us in more of a partnership to ensure that we can process export permit applications in a more timely and predictable manner. We also—