Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. The inspection process that is followed when people arrive by vehicle consists of two steps: the officer must ask them certain questions, collect their identification documents and enter the information into a computer system. Each time that process takes

Public Accounts committee  Certainly it is possible, and that is how the system currently works. They do that check early on. The issue we focused more of our attention on was that once that check is done there is a period of time, and it used to be quite lengthy, while the application is in progress—

Public Accounts committee  Indeed, but it was getting up to three or four years not that long ago, in which there was a possibility for people to have committed crimes, so it was getting that information that we were most concerned about. As for the issue of whether there is anything that prevents the sha

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. We essentially recommended in paragraph 2.37 that they review when the optimal timing is rather than specifically saying that there was perhaps a better time. One of the other points we make in the report later on is that the validity of this clearance ch

Public Accounts committee  That's not what we say. We recommend that they look at the timing and that if they're going to make adjustments to the timing, they have a proper analysis and basis for that adjustment.

Public Accounts committee  The RCMP did not share it with the Department of Citizenship and Immigration. As we also point out, in 20 of those cases, they obtained the information by other means, and in 19 of those it was from the Canada Border Services Agency. However, the expectation is that the RCMP gen

International Trade committee  Mr. Chair, the authority limitation is, as we explained, that non-reported shipments cannot be opened at random. This means that the officer needs to have information of some kind from a shipment, but not a declaration, and he needs to form an opinion that there is a risk. This m

International Trade committee  The limited resources are to do with these points that we make in the other section of the report where we talk about where there is not systematic coverage—Canada Post parcel centres being an area of risk in this regard—and one of them didn't have any coverage at all.

International Trade committee  We mean that nobody was looking at the parcels going for export.

International Trade committee  There are sanctions that have been imposed on a number of countries. Most recently of course there were a number imposed on Russia, or business interests in Russia, so that's the kind of thing that we're talking about; whereas, as a result of a public policy decision, certain org

International Trade committee  We didn't look at it from that perspective. Our concern was that even with the current volumes, the systems and practices they had in place were, in a number of ways, not able to keep up.

International Trade committee  That's correct. The goods would have been assessed in most cases as they enter Canada as imports, rather than being considered as exports.

International Trade committee  Yes, I'm not saying that they weren't exports. What I'm saying is that the risk assessment would be done on them as an import into Canada, and then not done as they left to the United States because of the exclusion on exports to the United States.

International Trade committee  Not necessarily.

International Trade committee  The discussion that we have about that in the report is around this question of the agency's third priority, which is the controls of other organizations. What we say is the way in which that is done by the other organizations is pushing targets to CBSA and saying, “Could you ple