Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank the presenters very much. As the mother of an RCMP officer, I can tell you that I like to hear some of these things. Also, I do have some questions I want to ask about this provision, and I don't at all have the background that you do, but I've just heard about and done some reading and pulled some things off the website.
There were a couple of things I wondered about. There was a question earlier about what police officers this jurisdiction would involve. I think it was Mr. Lee who asked that question. I pulled a report off the website we were just talking about. In that report, it referred only to the RCMP. So I did have a concern about extending that to joint forces units that were not in the RCMP, because when I read this I thought to myself that it is a relatively narrow jurisdiction. This wouldn't be the ordinary police officer; this would be the joint forces unit. This would be something that comes from senior management down. It's not something where a police officer would just say he is going to investigate a drug unit and he needs special consideration. A lot of process goes into place before this actually would occur.
I think it is so important to have, because it does protect our police officers who are under orders--and not only orders, but I know they want to do it too, because they get very involved in this--to protect our streets. I haven't read the whole Criminal Code, but has there been consideration in here for other police officers and for careful backup for them, so there can be no mistakes made? When you're on the ground and something happens, you might have to get this permission very quickly because you might have to be on the scene very quickly, or if there's a narc or somebody undercover. These things happen. Does it serve this need?