Thank you for your submission today; it's been very enlightening.
Mr. Beer, just to carry on with this part of the discussion, it was mentioned when we had our discussions in Haiti that one of the difficulties with corruption in the police force was that many of them aren't paid, that wages and salaries are nonexistent or very sporadic, leading you to believe that part of the corruption is simply from people trying to put food on the table for their own family. Of course, the toughest law that you break in your lifetime is always the first one, and the next are easier and easier. Is there a certain element of truth to that or not?
Also, regarding the resources that you have, I note that you mentioned there are 65 Canadian police officers there, out of a commitment of 100. There were 70 or 75 when we were there, leading to a comment being made that it's continually understaffed and that there's an absence of full commitment. Of course that leads to the question, what about the other contributing partners to this issue? Are they also shortchanging their resources by one-third?
As you were saying, I would think it would be an untenable circumstance to not be able to carry out your total policing duties because of a lack of a firm and fully detailed mandate to do so. I guess I would repeat that it sounds as though that's absolutely essential to have established, even if goes to the extent of the judiciary, too, having some international component to be able to cope with that. Is this really not what's continuing the problem in Haiti? In other words, is this not the background to why there is the large Cité Soleil area that is held by others and the UN can't control? When you're talking about resources, if you had the exact setup that you wished to have in your police and judiciary, would Cité Soleil simply not be there?
Maybe you could help me on some of these.