As we become more engaged in auto theft—again, I'll point out that last year, we seized about 1,800 vehicles—we are getting better in how we do our targeting and how we manage things like the vehicle identification numbers, VINs, for example. What we're trying to do is take the information that we get as part of export declarations, which includes the VINs, and use that to improve our targeting.
We have a very sophisticated targeting capacity in our national targeting centre, which is primarily focused on inbound containers. We're now turning our attention to exports and trying to do the very same thing.
If we were to try to search every single container.... At the Port of Montreal, I think there are 2,300 containers a day. The technology we have to do a search can do about 10 per hour. If we had 10 screening devices, we could do all 2,300 in a day, but that doesn't account for the backlog that would occur with vehicles lining up and trains lining up. It's just physically impossible to search every container. That's why it's so important to leverage information and intelligence and do our targeting.
Have there been gaps in our targeting? Yes. Are we getting better at it? I'd like to think so. We're seeing it in our results.
Historically, at the Port of Montreal, we prided ourselves on responding to 100% of referrals from the police of jurisdiction. It meant that most of the vehicles we were finding for a while were from police referrals. Now, about 70% of the vehicles we're finding are based on our own targeting, and the other 30% are from police referrals.
This is not just at the Port of Montreal; we're now seeing vehicles being exported through the Port of Vancouver. If you look at the Port of Vancouver, where we've launched a project, about 90%, if not 95%, of the targeting is based on CBSA analysis. We're starting to see the results, with 27 vehicles in the last two or three weeks at the Port of Vancouver.
One of the challenges we have is that every effort we put in at the Port of Montreal will displace the threat to something like the Port of St. John's, the Port of Halifax or the Port of Vancouver.
While our focus is very much on the Port of Montreal, we are also looking at other ports in the country.