Responding to the issue about the effectiveness of the overall strategy is very difficult, because the overall strategy of the national crime prevention program, it seems to me, has both the strength and weakness of being diffuse, which is that large numbers of programs are being given relatively small amounts of money to do various kinds of community programming. That wouldn't have been my choice. My choice would have been to focus crime prevention dollars on known effective programs and to evaluate them while they're going, so that we would actually know.
There was one European program I'm aware of that was quite similar, where money was given to relatively small communities, and communities did various things. The overall impact of that seemed to be relatively small. My concern is that where you give $50,000 here and $20,000 here and $100,000 here, you have so many programs, most of which aren't being properly evaluated, that in the end you're not going to know what's effective.
If I were to allocate crime prevention dollars, what I would say is let's look at four or five different kinds of things that we might be able to do. Let's put those in place in a number of different locations, and let's seriously evaluate and modify what we're doing. So when we find out something is working in one place, we modify the other programs, and when we find out other things are not working, we stop them.
I don't think we have that, because as I've said, what we've done is to say, let everybody in Canada have a go at this, and we have all these bits and pieces around.