Maybe I can explain it this way. There needs to be a very seamless integration between our borders and our inland teams and our international partners, our liaison officers abroad. As we get information and we start to verify it and dig into it a little deeper, we very often find ties that were not substantiated at the outset. Through our international liaison officers, through partners--whether domestic partners or international partners--we were able to tie into other pieces that were missing.
If we're referring to the borders specifically, the criminal organizations that exploit the borders do not reside at the border. They usually reside in the large centres, in the large cities. They exploit the borders through facilitators who know the borders well and do that. They facilitate work for those major criminal organizations. Here is where it becomes very important to be able to get those links and be able to push the border in and out as far as possible.
We talked about the seizure of guns, for example. A customs officer, through his alertness and discussion with someone coming through, uncovers contraband in a vehicle, whatever it may be--a gun, drugs, whatever. That's thanks to the alertness and good work of the customs officer, and that's great, if it's small--such as a gun, for example, a one-time thing.
Where they come across major shipments of something, and they have, they've done excellent work in that regard. They have done this on cold hits, without any information being passed on to them to tell them that something would be coming through the border, and that's well and good and great. They've done that because of the training they have and so on. But I view that as a failure, not on their part, but on the part of the intelligence. I always ask the question, how did that large amount of contraband--drugs, guns, whatever--get to the border without our knowing about it? Where are the pieces that are missing that should have uncovered the larger picture?
Having liaison officers who uncover links before the items ever get into North America, before they get to our borders, having inland teams who investigate those criminal organizations in Canada to find out exactly what they're up to and what exactly their intentions are, if their intentions are to internationally import or export, whether it's.... Canada is seen now as a source country for methamphetamine and ecstasy, and we have a strategy in place to deal with that. That is being exported out of Canada, mostly to the United States.
Whether it's being imported or exported, we need to be able to join the dots to be able to interrupt that activity before it gets to our borders.