Under the temporary resident biometrics project, those persons who are required to provide us a biometric go to a visa application centre somewhere in the world. There are over 180 such facilities for them to go to in, I think, 94 countries.
When submitting their application, they will also submit fingerprints and have a digital photograph taken. The photograph and the prints will accompany that application into our system. The prints will be verified against immigration prints that are being stored by our colleagues at the RCMP. They will also be compared against criminal prints that the RCMP has collected for many years now. Whether there's a match or not, that information will get back to the visa officer who will be assigned to that case, most often within minutes, certainly within the hour. Any information coming from that process will help inform an immigration decision.
The information can be that sometimes there's a match against a previous application using the same identity. We have confirmation that it's the same person making another application to come and visit. That gives the officer some confidence in the identity of the person. In other cases we might find out that this is someone who has previously committed a crime in the country and been deported and is now trying to return to the country. That's essentially the process in terms of how we use these prints.
The other part of it, I guess, would be on arrival. We can then verify that the person getting off the airplane is the same person who made the application.