Mr. Chair, in the February report we tabled our follow-up of the audit we had done on the passport the previous year because the public accounts committee had asked us to do a follow-up. We normally would have waited a little longer. Our work was essentially completed in August-September, as was this report, which was obviously before all the problems in January-February. We did note in that audit that there was a not bad forecasting system at head office of the passport office, but the individual offices didn't have contingency plans in place for surges in demand. Of course, with the western hemisphere travel initiative, the demand went up suddenly in January. I think a lot of people had speculated that it wasn't going to happen, so waited, and then of course with a lot of travel in Canada in the winter, the demand was enormous. I was told by the department even the printing presses for the passports were running 24 hours a day; they were right up to top volume.
I think there are lessons learned, and we will be going back, because we went in so quickly after the initial audit. We will be going back at some point, and that would certainly be one of the issues we would look at--how well they managed these spikes, because one could expect there will be another one coming with the land border crossings.
We'll have to take a look at how well they manage those fluctuations in volumes in the contingency planning.