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

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

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 t

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 dial

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 attempti

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

International Trade committee  What we would need is that the new system could still receive the declarations electronically.

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.

International Trade committee  Part of the problem with the system is it was not designed for risk assessment. It was designed, essentially, for statistical data collection.

International Trade committee  One that was designed to do that would make a substantial difference, because it would allow you to encode into the system rules to look for things, which at the moment has to be done entirely by staff.

International Trade committee  That is their long-term goal, yes.

International Trade committee  That was what led us to make the comment about uncertainty, because at the time that we were doing this work there wasn't a clear way forward agreed between the two organizations.

International Trade committee  Mr. Chair, in paragraph 78 we talk about the work we did to try and get at that question, which was to survey the exporters whose goods were detained. We got responses back from about half of the exporters whose goods had been detained and subsequently released in our period. Of

International Trade committee  Mr. Chair, we sent a survey to every exporter who had had a shipment detained and then released. There were only 300 such shipments during the period of our audit, which gets back to your initial question about how many. There are millions of containers that leave the country eve