Foreign Affairs committee  If I can add to that, 7,000 Canadians gave us their suggestions in an open-ended consultation process. It was very beneficial for us because it enabled us to see how we could make our program more relevant to Canadians. That was really critical for us, because when you're in the

Foreign Affairs committee  At this point in time there is no plan to introduce a second biometric to the e-passport. Should that come up there would, of course, need to be some consultations under the Privacy Act, in order to make sure that the proper privacy assessment is made.

Foreign Affairs committee  Once again, the cause of that is the confirmation of identity. Identity confirmation is a lot of work. Through activity-based management, we see that the production of an identity certificate costs us about $700. A lot of very specific work is involved in carrying out that activi

Foreign Affairs committee  Could I ask Michel?

Foreign Affairs committee  It's $139.

Foreign Affairs committee  We are. We try to balance the books. We introduced as many efficiencies as we could. However, through the budget of 2008 and 2010, we got this line of credit on the fiscal framework from the Government of Canada to help us complete the User Fees Act consultation process so as to

Foreign Affairs committee  I should mention that we issue 4% of our passports abroad, but 30% of our security-related cases come up abroad. What we really have to consider are the children, first applications by adults, and persons whose passports were lost or stolen.

Foreign Affairs committee  In fact, Canadians asked us to keep the costs as low as possible and that is why both the 5- and 10-year passports will have 36 pages each. Thus, rather than having one 24-page passport and another 48-page passport, we will have a 36-page passport for all users, which will allow

Foreign Affairs committee  No, it will not have a chip. However, we're looking at having to balance, again, the cost of the program abroad. So one of the things.... I am going to continue my answer in French. One of the things Canadians told us is that they did not see the relevance of subsidizing servic

Foreign Affairs committee  That is correct. The idea is to strengthen security and that is the tendency the world over. We work in partnership a great deal with the United States, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand. There is an international tendency to strengthen security, as this is an element of n

Foreign Affairs committee  In fact, there are two parts to the answer. First, there are indeed costs to send things abroad and this generates higher costs, and secondly, there are a lot of children whose applications are received abroad. And so it costs more to produce those passports abroad because, once

Foreign Affairs committee  We are referring in particular to passport issuing systems, because we have an obsolete system that has to be replaced to improve security. We also want to consider online production, which will allow us to modernize and have the most effective systems possible. We also want to a

Foreign Affairs committee  Indeed, we asked that question during our consultations. For instance, there were consumer groups, and among these we had representatives of seniors' groups, students, and so on. People were not very favourable to the idea of subsidizing other kinds of passports aside from those

Foreign Affairs committee  We have to balance the program as a whole. Since we don't get budget appropriations, we have to balance revenues and expenditures. If we reduce the cost of a passport for one group, we have to increase the cost of the passport for other groups so that at the end of the 10-year cy

Foreign Affairs committee  Actually, I should say that we are producing more passports now with fewer people than we were during the crisis five years ago, so we have enhanced our efficiency by introducing national workload management. We also have a national tactical response team that watches in an execu