Public Safety committee  Well, sir, I can assure you that I am in constant communication with my U.S. colleagues. I can also assure you that the commissioner of CBP has a budget that is substantially greater than mine in terms of his ability to bring assets to bear on the 49th parallel. That said, I am completely confident in the ability of the CBSA to provide good, secure service to Canadians on the 49th parallel.

Public Safety committee  In terms of how we weighed our analysis in the context of the entire strategic review, the discussions that we have on an ongoing basis with industry, with stakeholders, with people who run bridges, with the tunnel operator in Windsor--all of these discussions, all of these predictions are taken into account on an ongoing basis.

Public Safety committee  Thank you very much.

Public Safety committee  It's approximately $1.5 billion or thereabouts.

Public Safety committee  It's very difficult to measure precisely what the economic impact would be. We certainly looked at the number of commercial releases, which, for example, in the case of Franklin Centre, averaged, for the last period we looked at, around two and a half per day. So it is relatively low in terms of total commercial throughput.

Public Safety committee  It's not ultimately my decision to open and close a port. It's not something I can unilaterally do. But I can assure you that if volumes begin to change, if they shift across the entirety of our operations, we're constantly watching that. If we close a port, we can't watch for changes in volumes that aren't there anymore, but we would watch for volume changes in the adjacent ports where we are redirecting traffic.

Public Safety committee  I don't necessarily reconcile them in comparative terms. The human smuggling bill looks at the sorts of flows that we have seen in terms of mass migration, which is largely mass marine migration. The sort of irregular migration that we see across the land border tends to be much, much lower.

Public Safety committee  Certainly we are a member of the IBETs partnership, yes. Certainly we are in constant dialogue with U.S. CBP and U.S. ICE, and with a number of other American border and national security organizations as well. At the same time, I think I can safely say that we have constant outreach with a number of industry stakeholders with whom we talk about threat and risk profiles, the sorts of things that they are seeing from a trade chain security point of view.

Public Safety committee  That would be by the closest roads.

Public Safety committee  On the three points of entry we're debating here, I believe the total savings will be about $1.25 million.

Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  That's just for the three ports: two in Quebec and one in Saskatchewan. If you're talking about the entire process, in excess of $58 million will be returned annually to the government for reallocation for higher-priority expenditures.

Public Safety committee  There are certainly jobs that will be affected by the closure of the ports. We are hopeful, and it will be my priority, that within the ambits of the attrition--the turnover that CBSA deals with each year--we will be able to offer alternate employment to all of the employees who are affected.

Public Safety committee  Thank you for the question. Obviously we are always looking at the throughput through all of our ports. We're always looking at the size of the facility, the amount of commercial traffic that goes through, the individual traffic that goes through, and our ability to respond to the pressures at each individual location.

Public Safety committee  In the case of Jamieson's Line, it's about 10 kilometres; in the case of Franklin Centre, it's 16 kilometres; and in the case of Big Beaver, it is about 60 kilometres.