As I've said before this committee and publicly multiple times, it's clear that our agency's resources are stretched. The demands on our limited resources have significantly increased in just the last few years with the digital economy growing by leaps and bounds, the data-driven economy. This has put a tremendous stress on the organization's investigations.
Just to illustrate the point, I note that in between the 2017-18 fiscal year and the next fiscal year, we obtained an additional 4,459 gigabytes of data in our investigations. One gigabyte of data equals enough to fill a small truck, or 678,000 pages approximately. In one year, with the increase in the data we were reviewing as part of our many investigations—we have other enforcement areas other than mergers—the amount of data brought into the bureau related to those reviews grew by three billion additional pages. Now, that's in the context of our budget, which has been flat for 10 years and has, if you take into account inflation, declined by 10% over that time.
In terms of this review, we will allocate, and prioritize internally to allocate, the resources necessary to conduct a thorough review of this particular transaction. I can assure this committee of that. We do that all the time at the bureau. We have to prioritize. We have to move resources around to do the best possible job we can to protect the public interest and protect Canadians' interests.