Evidence of meeting #24 for Public Safety and National Security in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was gps.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Bernard Trottier Conservative Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON
Have you gotten to the stage where they've discussed some of their operational requirements? Has there been nothing like that?
Director General, Defence Research and Development Canada - Centre for Security Science, Department of National Defence
No. I mean we have in vague terms, but nothing in the context of being able to actually quantify it in a formal way that could lead to a technical specification.
Conservative
Bernard Trottier Conservative Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON
From the research you've been doing, can you describe some of the operational requirements that have been put forth in jurisdictions in which they are using electronic monitoring? What are some of the things that are out there and have proven difficult to accomplish with the existing technologies?
Director General, Defence Research and Development Canada - Centre for Security Science, Department of National Defence
The whole issue of this general word “drift” that's used in GPS systems is clearly a problem. It would appear that the technology is not satisfactory in all circumstances. The question is whether we are focusing too much on those few circumstances when it's not satisfactory and blowing that out of proportion. I don't know the answer to that, as we haven't looked at it yet.
Conservative
Bernard Trottier Conservative Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON
I guess you've been doing some research and seeing what's out there.
Director General, Defence Research and Development Canada - Centre for Security Science, Department of National Defence
A little bit.
Conservative
Bernard Trottier Conservative Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON
Are there countries or jurisdictions that are using electronic monitoring a lot? Are they getting some success from it?
Director General, Defence Research and Development Canada - Centre for Security Science, Department of National Defence
I know a number of countries, just anecdotally, that have used it. I can't really tell you the level of success, because we haven't looked at it from that perspective. We've been trying to focus more on some of the technical issues.
Conservative
Bernard Trottier Conservative Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON
I see. Is there a sense that in Europe there is more use of it than in the United States, Japan, Australia, and other places like that?
Director General, Defence Research and Development Canada - Centre for Security Science, Department of National Defence
I honestly can't answer that question.
Conservative
Bernard Trottier Conservative Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON
Okay.
Ultimately this thing has come down to a certain business case, I suppose. The priority is public safety, but if we could conduct correctional services and monitoring services more cost-effectively, this would be a useful application of these technologies. Has anybody out there done a business case to show how this could save money in correctional services?
Director General, Defence Research and Development Canada - Centre for Security Science, Department of National Defence
I know there are various views on this, but we haven't engaged in a discussion of those views because it's outside our scope of involvement in the activity.
Conservative
Bernard Trottier Conservative Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON
Sometimes there is the potential to develop technology in Canada through programs like this. I know in defence procurement, for example, other countries will direct some of the procurement processes to local suppliers to develop capacity in a local market.
Are there any Canadian companies, small or medium-sized enterprises, that could be cultivated as potential vendors? It would be interesting for us to help them along.
Director General, Defence Research and Development Canada - Centre for Security Science, Department of National Defence
There could be. It's my impression that many of the devices available in Canada are made in other countries and they have Canadian distributors for them. So I'm not sure that there's a thriving or even a growing Canadian capability.
Pierre, maybe you have a comment on that.
Portfolio Manager, Surveillance, Intelligence and Interdiction, Defence Research and Defence Canada - Centre for Security Science, Department of National Defence
I haven't come across any small Canadian companies that are trying to make a go of this. I haven't come across anything in
my overview of the technology.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you.
We'll now move back to the opposition side. Madam Borg.
Charmaine Borg NDP Terrebonne—Blainville, QC
Thank you.
I know that the workforce needed to operate this technology has been mentioned several times. Those employees need to sit in front of a screen and check in real time where the tracked person is, and so on. Do you know how many people it would take to monitor one person? What would the ratio be?
Director General, Defence Research and Development Canada - Centre for Security Science, Department of National Defence
I can't tell you; I don't know. We haven't looked at that. We have a wide range of capabilities within other parts of Defence Research and Development Canada that look at concepts for command and control systems with the Canadian Forces. In a general sense, the monitoring facility could be likened to a command and control centre, so there are possibilities of doing some of that sort of work in the future. But I'm not an expert in that area, and I can't really comment on it.
NDP
Charmaine Borg NDP Terrebonne—Blainville, QC
I understand that different types of technologies could be adopted. I also know that a few provinces already use certain technologies. Could their model be used, or would something new have to be developed?
Director General, Defence Research and Development Canada - Centre for Security Science, Department of National Defence
I'm not familiar with the details of what other provinces are doing. If we were to get involved, we would probably go and talk to the users in these other provinces to get some of their views. But we would be focusing more on the technology applications. It would be good to get their experience in the use of the technologies and to find out their views on some of these issues. We've talked about false alarm issues.
NDP
Charmaine Borg NDP Terrebonne—Blainville, QC
I also want to know whether the response time is fast once it is noticed that someone has left a geographic area or gone beyond a certain limit. What would be the response time? Does that depend on the officers or the technology?
Director General, Defence Research and Development Canada - Centre for Security Science, Department of National Defence
Again, it depends. In theory, if you built an appropriate system, you could get an alarm directly from the GPS device into a monitoring centre virtually instantaneously. I can't tell you what the current systems do in that regard because we haven't studied them yet, but there's no technological reason why you can't get an immediate alarm. But all these things come at a cost. That's one of the issues, because you can do almost anything if you're willing to pay for it. So I really can't comment any more than that at this point.
NDP
Charmaine Borg NDP Terrebonne—Blainville, QC
Costs were mentioned several times. Do you have an estimate, a specific idea of the costs involved? Could you give us a general idea of what the costs could be, in terms of maximum and minimum amounts?
Director General, Defence Research and Development Canada - Centre for Security Science, Department of National Defence
In our brief survey so far, we've seen some numbers that people quote. I don't know where those numbers come from, but people talk about $5 and $15 a day. I don't know where those come from. I don't know what their operational model is that allows them to come up with those estimates, but they're out there. Again, I think one of the things that needs to happen is an analysis of those cost figures, and we could, in fact, get involved a little bit to help do some analysis. These numbers are floating around out there. I read them, but I don't know how they get them at this point in time.