We have 13 crown witness coordinators on staff at present. We're in the process of hiring a 14th. They are all based in the three territories, and the reason for that is the nature of our practice differs in the territories from the provinces.
In the provinces, the majority of our prosecutions are either drug prosecutions or regulatory prosecutions, and typically the witnesses in those prosecutions are either police officers or investigators from government departments. In the north we do the Criminal Code prosecutions, and as a result, most of the witnesses in those prosecutions are citizens who have been the victim of a crime.
In order to assist those individuals...first of all, we locate those individuals, because you will recall that we're dealing with the three territories, with communities spread all across them. We explain the court process to them. Often, for example, in Nunavut they don't understand English, so our crown witness coordinators, who speak Inuktitut, and assist the prosecutors in communicating with the witnesses.
This goes back to a question that was asked earlier. They will also refer the victims, the witnesses, to appropriate territorial services for assistance, when such services exist.
We deal with the individuals as witnesses, not as victims, because our role is to prosecute the cases. That's why there are territorial services available to deal with them in terms of being victims. We turn it over to them.