Quickly, on the fairness and calling me, when I get incidents that come right to my desk—and people do call me to say they ran into a problem at the border and they don't feel they were treated correctly—every single one of those is looked into with a full, detailed report that comes to me and goes back to the individual. If required, corrective action is taken.
I could show you significant correspondence where corrective action needed to be taken. Maybe a border officer was not sensitive to a particular issue or what a person was carrying—whatever it might be. In other cases, maybe the situation was an agreement to disagree. But every case that is reported gets a very significant review.
Given our time, first, you will get the explanation where there appear to be decreases. For instance, on one of the pages you referenced there was a decrease, but because money had been asked for the year before, in terms of some new health information management modules, all the technology was purchased and everything put in place, so that amount wasn't required and it appears as a decrease. But I'll show you the subsequent increases in the other areas you mentioned.
On the last one--this is very important, and it's interesting that the member has raised it. I'm somewhat sad to report that the pre-clearance discussions have come to an end. In my view, pre-clearance offered some great opportunities. If members are not familiar with this, pre-clearance would give the ability for traffic moving from one country to the other to be cleared before it actually gets to the other border. Each country would purchase an area of land on the other side of the border where you can clear a lot of that traffic, and then it sails on through the border.
A lot of issues had to be worked out, because you're talking about our officers working on what is really U.S. soil and American officers working on our soil. Of course, we maintain that Canadian sovereignty has to be paramount. Then keeping that in place, we worked out virtually every problem that arose except for one. The U.S. was requiring that if a person came to the border point—on Canadian soil, but it's their border point in a pre-clearance area—and there was some suspicion, the person would be required to go to secondary and be fingerprinted. Our law states that Canadians can only be fingerprinted voluntarily or if they're being charged with a crime. Not being charged with a crime, you cannot be required to be fingerprinted. The U.S. side sees it a little different. They say that on their soil, once you show up at a border point and you're under some suspicion, you can be taken to secondary and fingerprinted. They wanted to maintain that same capability on Canadian soil.
We looked at alternatives. They pushed hard for that. I said I'm sorry, that's a basic Canadian right. It is charter supported, and as much as I would want to see pre-clearance go ahead, we are not going to diminish the right of any Canadian on Canadian territory.
I'm sorry, but it ground to a halt on that point. I regret that. I've asked them to reconsider their position, but they seem to be sticking with it.