Thank you very much.
First of all, on the issue of the 40,000 warrants, for the most part these are individuals who have been in the immigration system and at an appointed time they have not presented themselves for a hearing or some other process within the normal immigration process. So when they do not present themselves appropriately and legally, we issue a warrant for their arrest. The vast majority of them would subsequently be removed, although there are some who would be found, arrested, and then brought back into the immigration system.
What we have done in looking at this situation is three things. First of all, we conducted a pilot study in our northern Ontario region to determine what exactly the demographic potentially of the 40,000 has been. What we found was that in the sample we looked at upward of half of the sample were individuals who had left Canada. It is very difficult for the CBSA to make these determinations, as the Auditor General has said, in the normal course of events absent exit controls, because there is no requirement for anybody to present themselves upon exit from Canada. So we have a very large potential component of the total inventory who in all likelihood have left Canada for the United States, or back to their home country, or to another country.
Second, we have begun to look also at how we examine the demographic constituent parts of the total inventory. For example, if you have somebody who is 75 years old, it may well be that sustaining a warrant for them is not the most cost-effective approach for the agency to take, so we're looking at what we refer to as our warrant cancellation policy.
Hopefully as we complete this work it will give us a more structured view of what the really core number is within the total warrant inventory of 41,000 that we have before us now. We know for a fact that within that warrant inventory approximately 2,800 to 2,900 of these individuals have some criminal affiliation. And criminal issues, organized crimes issues, etc., people who fall into gang affiliations when they come into Canada, are consistently our priority in looking at where we can find these people, how we find them, and making them a priority in terms of our removals.
If you look at the 12,000 or so removals we have consistently done over the last two or three years, you'll see that about 16% to 17% of those removals are consistently people with a criminal background.
We've also initiated the pursuit of a couple of other things. Number one, we need to work more acutely with our American colleagues to make determinations as to when people have left Canada for the United States. We believe there is some fertile ground there that we can pursue in terms of getting information from the Americans for people who have entered the United States so we can basically take them off our inventory.
At the same time, we want to make our investigative techniques a lot more acute. When we get down to that refined number in the total gross inventory we want to make sure that we're doing proper data mining. We want to make sure we are contacting the proper authorities, working with law enforcement, working with provincial authorities, working with municipal authorities. For the most part, these people have dropped out of public view.