Right now the project has not broadened its scope, but it has broadened the number of players. It's being managed by the chief information officer at the Treasury Board Secretariat, and it is trying basically to define the requirements of most departments at the federal level so that we can develop a single point of contact for all federal institutions to access provincial vital statistics. In the past, we may have been in the process of developing a system under which different departments would ask for the same information, and pay twice, basically, for the same information, so we're looking at how we can manage that at the federal level and then enter into a series of partnerships with provinces.
One of the problems we had in the past was to design what this thing would be from a technological standpoint. Would we hit their database? Would it be just some kind of network through which information could be shared? There was a significant technological component that had to be solved, and of course finance is a significant element of the problem.
The second thing was the governance. Once you have a means to exchange information from province to province, from provinces to the federal government, who would be responsible for the governance of such a process?
The third element that has to be taken into account is the legal authority that provinces may have to transfer the information directly to us, and so on. Some provinces may be in a better position to do that, given their own legal framework.
This project is proceeding. It has now been taken over by the Treasury Board Secretariat, so that it applies to a series of federal departments, and not only to Passport Canada or to Service Canada, for instance.