Thank you.
Perhaps just to clarify the two separate issues, the lapse that you referred to is unrelated to the intelligence officers. That lapse was actually mostly reprofiled on projects, money we couldn't spend one year into another.
On your specific question with respect to intelligence officers, those positions were indeed reduced, as we had promised through the deficit reduction action plan. But if I can reassure the member, in assessing the intelligence needs of the CBSA, we took into consideration the existing number of intelligence officers versus the total complement of the CBSA. I spent 24 years working in intelligence for CSIS, and my assessment was that we had in fact too many resources in the intelligence function versus the complement of border services officers.
I can assure you that this was done very diligently with full comprehension of where we were reducing. From my perspective, I did not think that we were actually reducing the intelligence capacity of the CBSA, but cutting in areas that were not necessarily associated with collecting intelligence but were more analytical, and areas where I could actually gain that analysis from some of my partner agencies.
We made those cuts with full confidence that we wouldn't reduce our effectiveness.