The problem we faced back then, and I will have to sort of recollect what happened.... We certainly—the two commissioners—were favourable to moving forward at the time, but it just didn't.... What you have to realize is that we cannot proceed in an ad hoc sort of way.
Essentially, it was determined at that point that we would have fresh information from the census that could help us develop a sound methodology with the right numbers so that we could reassess the entire map. In a sense, it was just a temporary postponement, if you will. We started almost right over. As soon as the data from 2016 was available, the department started working with the commission on determining whether the current EI regions were homogeneous.
Just to point out quickly, what we're looking for is discrepancies. As you know, the building blocks of the regions are the census divisions. What we're looking for is outliers. Are there census divisions in current EI regions totally at odds with the prevailing state of things? Basically, it's a big jigsaw puzzle. For this we take into account the unemployment rate. We take into account labour market conditions.
The department developed a methodology that we approved. We worked very closely with them. Now the challenge is, as you may know, that there are about 300 census divisions in Canada, so we're not going to have 300 regions.