Public Safety committee  We can't tell you that right now. That's one of the things.... Again, from our perspective, the way we do our work, we need—to belabour the point again—to interact with the operators, the communities that want to use these things, and they have to tell us what the constraints are on using them.

Public Safety committee  I think it gets back to the performance you require. Companies make these devices. They make them according to a specification. Frankly, I don't know where they get that specification from. We've talked about how they work, under ideal conditions maybe to meet that specification, and under less than ideal conditions they probably don't meet the specification.

Public Safety committee  Any physical device can be subject to physical abuse. These things aren't made out of titanium. I think they're largely made out of reinforced plastic. There's waterproofing; there's the whole issue of whether you can tamper with them, whether you can use electronic devices to interfere with the radio signals.

Public Safety committee  Certainly, I think you'll find in the federal government that the Department of National Defence has some of the best support for this type of activity, but other people may well be able to provide input as well. In fact, if we were tasked to do something, one of the first things would be to find out who all those individuals were and bring together a team.

Public Safety committee  We've only looked at catalogues, if you will. We haven't physically sited the devices. We haven't really done any real analysis on them. I think Pierre has looked at them in a bit more detail than I have. Pierre, would you like to comment?

Public Safety committee  I'm not familiar with the details of what other provinces are doing. If we were to get involved, we would probably go and talk to the users in these other provinces to get some of their views. But we would be focusing more on the technology applications. It would be good to get their experience in the use of the technologies and to find out their views on some of these issues.

Public Safety committee  Again, it depends. In theory, if you built an appropriate system, you could get an alarm directly from the GPS device into a monitoring centre virtually instantaneously. I can't tell you what the current systems do in that regard because we haven't studied them yet, but there's no technological reason why you can't get an immediate alarm.

Public Safety committee  In our brief survey so far, we've seen some numbers that people quote. I don't know where those numbers come from, but people talk about $5 and $15 a day. I don't know where those come from. I don't know what their operational model is that allows them to come up with those estimates, but they're out there.

Public Safety committee  I honestly can't answer that question.

Public Safety committee  There could be. It's my impression that many of the devices available in Canada are made in other countries and they have Canadian distributors for them. So I'm not sure that there's a thriving or even a growing Canadian capability. Pierre, maybe you have a comment on that.

Public Safety committee  Over a number of months now we've had a few relatively brief interactions, if you will, to try to understand what we might be able to bring to the table. The situation, as I understand it, is that Public Safety and Corrections are looking at doing something else, and they're looking for potentially some form of advanced technical support to help them in whatever it is they're going to do.

Public Safety committee  No. I mean we have in vague terms, but nothing in the context of being able to actually quantify it in a formal way that could lead to a technical specification.

Public Safety committee  The whole issue of this general word “drift” that's used in GPS systems is clearly a problem. It would appear that the technology is not satisfactory in all circumstances. The question is whether we are focusing too much on those few circumstances when it's not satisfactory and blowing that out of proportion.

Public Safety committee  A little bit.

Public Safety committee  I know a number of countries, just anecdotally, that have used it. I can't really tell you the level of success, because we haven't looked at it from that perspective. We've been trying to focus more on some of the technical issues.