I obviously followed the Shafia case. As I have talked to different police officers across the country—and believe me I have worked right across the country—throughout my years of service, I have found that there is a lack of cultural knowledge. Because Canada is such a multicultural country—there are 6.8 million immigrants in this country—it's practically impossible for police departments to actually build a perfect capacity to serve each and every community and its challenges overnight.
When I looked at the gaps, especially in relation to how the accused or the people who were committing the acts were trying to justify their actions based on family honour—which is a very despicable act but their justification for what they were doing—I felt that more education was needed. The training I spoke about is not to make people subject matter experts, because we have to walk before we start driving. It's introductory training to provide basic knowledge. The training is done online so it is available to everyone in a very simple fashion. From there we can make more strides towards developing more expertise among those specific individuals who actually have a keen interest, and we can build up that capacity within the police departments.
One good thing in Canada is that we have many police departments but they all work together, and we have really closed those gaps amongst police services. The Kingston trial was a perfect example in which we had many different agencies participating to assist Kingston police on that file. So as we build up more capacity in Canada—not just within the RCMP—I think we are going to see better results in being able to identify these kinds of cases and maybe actually get ahead of them before it's too late.