There are 3,000 to 4,000 complaints a year internally at CBSA. Those are prepandemic travel numbers.
We looked at what scaling up the commission to handle roughly that volume of complaints about CBSA might look like, and then, in working with the central agencies of the Department of Finance and Treasury Board, we began to establish what the organization would look like and what its needs would be.
That went through the federal budget process, and the finance minister, in the budget, announced the global sum of $112.3 million over six years for the implementation of the project as a whole. The next step of how much of that money goes to the commission versus how much goes to the RCMP or CBSA comes through the estimates process, through the main or supplementary estimates, when the government seeks to appropriate the money for the new organization.
There are other means available, when necessary, to top up the operating budget of the organization. The government, in the past, made funds available to the CRCC when it required funds, for example, through the program integrity exercise.
