Public Safety committee  I know there are various views on this, but we haven't engaged in a discussion of those views because it's outside our scope of involvement in the activity.

Public Safety committee  I can't tell you; I don't know. We haven't looked at that. We have a wide range of capabilities within other parts of Defence Research and Development Canada that look at concepts for command and control systems with the Canadian Forces. In a general sense, the monitoring facility could be likened to a command and control centre, so there are possibilities of doing some of that sort of work in the future.

Public Safety committee  I think—and I'm speaking not so much from experience but based upon my intuition as an engineer—if you have a system like a GPS system, which can actually log the individual's position on a minute-by-minute basis, that represents a fairly large data file of information that needs to be transmitted and sorted and digested by some individual who assesses the response, whereas one of the RF systems or biometric systems tends to work based upon a single sample of information that's sent to a monitoring centre.

Public Safety committee  I'm not a police officer and I'm not involved with Corrections Canada, so I really can't answer that. From a technical perspective, the response time from the time the individual transgresses to the time that a police officer is informed of the transgression could be very short.

Public Safety committee  I think it depends upon the circumstances. If you're in a very heavily wooded area close to big buildings, you will get very poor data. In fact you could get huge numbers of false alarms. So it's very situation-dependent, and it's hard to come up with just one number for the false alarm rate.

Public Safety committee  In a more general sense, if you're asking me about the Centre for Security Science—

Public Safety committee  Do you mean for this electronic monitoring issue?

Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  Again, the folks I mentioned who work out at Shirley's Bay look at those sorts of things in a military context. Those inaccuracies tend to fall into this word “drift” that people use all the time. As I tried to mention earlier, the basic GPS technology, the cheapest form of implementation, basically assumes that you've got these nice, direct, uninterrupted paths from the satellite to your receiver, and you've got at least four of these and the signal is very strong.

Public Safety committee  Again, that's driven largely by the cost. I can't imagine that a Canadian program could afford to go out and improve on the performance of these devices. Pretty much, I think, you're looking for something that's off the shelf, and the question is what the differences are in the implementations.

Public Safety committee  I'll respond in English, if you don't mind. The terms “active” and “passive” refer, as we understand it at this point in time, to the GPS type of systems. Active refers to the notion that the system is essentially in continuous contact with the monitoring centre. How often it actually interacts with the monitoring centre is, again, one of these operational specifications: does it need to be every five minutes, every 10 seconds?

Public Safety committee  I'm going to ask Pierre to answer that because he's been looking at those more than I have.

Public Safety committee  I can't answer that. I'm sorry.

Public Safety committee  No, I'm sorry I can't. Again, we're here as technical experts and advisors to Public Safety Canada and Correctional Services Canada. Those types of questions, I think, are more appropriately directed towards those departments.

Public Safety committee  I talked a little bit about the Centre for Security Science and what our role is: to reach out to the policy and operational community, find requirements, and then reach back into the hard-core science and technology community to talk to the experts. While I may sound like an expert in GPS...I'm an electrical engineer but not really an expert in GPS.