There are a couple of things. I think it should be apparent from the testimony from Monday and today that we're in violent agreement with the Auditor General's recommendations. In many instances, the fact that we didn't have adequate performance indicators actually diminishes the progress that, frankly, I think we showed over the course of this initiative.
Let me give you an example. On NEXUS, the AG's report was very clear. They looked at the initiatives and they looked at NEXUS. From a national security perspective, with NEXUS, an individual voluntarily fills out an extensive application form, provides information on where they lived over the past five years and their jobs, and it's submitted to both Canadian and U.S. authorities. They vet it, give you a green light, and you go into an office where there's a CBSA employee and a U.S. border patrol individual. They take your picture and your biometric information. The U.S. takes your fingerprints, and then Canada takes an iris scan. There are now probably 1.5 million people in North America who have a NEXUS card, 80% of whom are Canadian, so when you go to a border, CBSA officers don't have to pay attention to somebody such as me who has a NEXUS card. They can focus their attention on higher risk travellers. That's a huge benefit to us. How do you measure that? I don't know.
Mr. Christopherson was starting to identify a better performance measure than the ones we used to talk about with NEXUS. Brian talked about the fact that if you compare, with NEXUS you show up in front of a CBSA officer, you show him your card and you clear customs, and you do it in a certain period of time. If you do it conventionally, it takes you 20 to 30 seconds longer.
Do you ever use your NEXUS card at Pearson airport on a Friday night? Do you use your NEXUS card in Ottawa when you're trying to go home on a Thursday night? When you can use your card, you can bypass the general line because CATSA sets up a line that allows NEXUS holders to clear through.
I don't know what performance indicator you would get talking to people at Pearson airport on a Friday night, but if you look at the numbers of NEXUS people, 20,000 new applicants a month want NEXUS. From a national security perspective, I like the fact that we're looking at trusted travellers and allowing our border officials to really focus on medium and higher risk travellers. That's a significant benefit.
One of the other things is hard to really understand when you look at the AG's report. The AG is very clear that they didn't look at national security issues. They talked to the U.S., but they didn't reflect U.S. views on this, and they didn't really talk about the Canada-U.S. relationship. However, when you start to look at what NEXUS does for you, when you look at the electronic travel authorization, which now means passengers from non-visa exempt countries have to submit an ETA before they board a flight, it means in Canada we can actually give the airlines information to tell them to board or not to board an individual. That's really important to us. We'd much rather do that abroad than in Canada.
We have another initiative, called IAPI. I've been working on this file for three years. For the life of me, I don't know what IAPI means, but it gives us information that the airlines provide us before an individual boards a flight. Our security agencies can look at IAPI and they can use their algorithms, their analytics, to better target people so that when they arrive in Canada they can get the scrutiny they require. This is all a package of things that we talked about in beyond the border.
Another thing is CPIC, a tool used by the RCMP. CPIC is a good one. When CBSA officers have someone come up to them at the point of entry, they look at their passport. On CPIC, they can see if someone has an outstanding warrant or if they have a criminal record. Since CBSA has started using CPIC, they have now achieved thousands of apprehensions and they're actually using this tool to protect our borders to a much greater extent.
Sadly, I can't tell you exactly how many people have been apprehended by CPIC. Hopefully, when we put the performance measures in place, we'll be able to do that.