International Trade committee  Mr. Chair, it's not just that it wasn't user friendly, though that's certainly an issue. The other issue was it was an old system that Statistics Canada basically wanted to retire and had been wanting to retire for a number of years. The question was if it was to be retired, what would replace it.

International Trade committee  I'm sorry, I don't know that off the top of my head.

International Trade committee  Yes. It's quite an old system. As we said, they had started to think about replacing it as early as at least since 2009 so it has been quite a long time that they have even been at that stage.

Public Accounts committee  I think one of the key issues here is what we mention at the beginning of paragraph 5.50, which is that the performance measurement for the border programs had been revised a number of times, but for many of the measures, the information had not been gathered. If you are attempting to put in place an integrated risk management process that takes risks, takes performance, and adjusts resources accordingly, you can't effectively do that in the absence of performance information.

Public Accounts committee  Not really, in terms of the details of why; part of what we were seeing was that as a result of the problems with the performance measure the agency was using, they weren't understanding some of the issues with the granularity of the information that would be necessary for a dialogue with the airlines on that question.

Public Accounts committee  Only to say I think that is the essence of it. In almost all the areas we looked at, with the exception, I think, of the targeting program, one of the key challenges is whether the information is there to allow you to know whether you're getting better or worse. With reference to your question about numbers of border guards, we didn't specifically look at that question in this report.

Public Accounts committee  The observation was that in their policy, which they had reformulated in 2009, they laid out a series of performance measures. They were not just looking at a single measure; there was a series of them. Our point was that they had not yet been getting information on all of them; they had only been getting information on some of them.

Public Accounts committee  That's right, at the time that we did the special exam.