Let me explain those particular consular fees. The fee was approved in 1995. It was for $25, which was included in the cost of the passport. When the fee was approved, it was very clearly laid out what activities would be included or could be charged for by this fee. To be quite honest, it really doesn't have a whole lot to do with the passport; it is for services provided to Canadians when they travel abroad. For example, I guess the most serious costs that have been incurred lately were for the evacuation from Lebanon and for aid that may have been given to Canadians during the tsunami. So in the fee approval, it listed the kinds of costs and said that Foreign Affairs could not charge for costs incurred on behalf of other departments; it had to be for their own consular costs. What we did was to look at what those costs of services are now, and we found that in fact the revenues from that $25 fee exceeded those costs.
What probably happened is that when they initially calculated it, they said that the costs of consular services were about $37 million, and as they were issuing about 1.5 million passports at the time, they came up with a $25 fee. Obviously, the number of passports that have been issued has gone up a lot. They're still collecting that $25 fee, but the moneys allocated to cover the costs of the consular services have not increased at the same rhythm. That's why they need to go back and look, I would think, first of all, at the basis of the costs that should be covered by that fee, and then redo the estimates of passports that will be issued, given the new volume.