Public Accounts committee  Thank you.

Public Accounts committee  Certainly. We have a very robust and fairly sophisticated relationship with CIC in the co-management of this program. The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act actually shares responsibilities between the ministers for immigration and public safety. When we got the recommendati

Public Accounts committee  There are countries around the world that do this: Australia and New Zealand are a couple of examples. I was just in Belgium, and Brussels has an exit program as well. A couple of perspectives: to the extent that Canada wanted to adopt this program, it would be a significant poli

Public Accounts committee  I'll ask my colleague, Barbara Hébert, to comment on that.

Public Accounts committee  The first thing I would say is that when you refer to criminality, there's a--

Public Accounts committee  When one refers to criminality, there are a number of stratifications that can be made. The people that we would release on terms and conditions, including a bond, would be people who, according to the evidence and in our judgment, represent minor criminality for the most part an

Public Accounts committee  Not that I want to punt the question, but I'll ask my colleague, Ms. Johnston, to comment. She's been handling a lot of these discussions.

Public Accounts committee  Certainly. I've been in this position for a little longer than six months. Prior to that, I was the Associate Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. Prior to that, I was the executive vice-president of the agency for a period of about 18 months.

Public Accounts committee  There are a couple of things, Mr. Christopherson. First, we use the resources that we have to target the higher-risk cases. Wherever we can locate somebody, using probably a disproportionate number of the resources on those cases, we remove them. We've been able to keep that leve

Public Accounts committee  Let me address your point with regard to why the number is going up. The prime correlation between the number of warrants going up is the number of refugees making applications to Canada, and that number has gone up systematically over the last three years. It's gone from 22,000

Public Accounts committee  The percentage of what?

Public Accounts committee  No, I think generally speaking the percentage of people we have to issue warrants against is in rough correlation with the growth in the number of people who are seeking access to the refugee system in Canada.

Public Accounts committee  I think where we're making improvements is by having a better sense of what's in the total inventory and trying to have a more acute sense of where we're going to target the resources that we have, both in terms of people who are still in Canada and people who fall into the high-

Public Accounts committee  Everything I've described to you over the last couple of minutes has been new things that we have begun doing over the last six or seven months, so I am hopeful that they are going to pay dividends and respond to some of the issues raised in the audit. I take your point. This is

Public Accounts committee  Thank you very much. First of all, on the issue of the 40,000 warrants, for the most part these are individuals who have been in the immigration system and at an appointed time they have not presented themselves for a hearing or some other process within the normal immigration p