Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to ask my questions on the Human Rights Commission. While you're looking for that, I just want to make an opening comment.
I'm glad you talked about prevention, because it's obvious in recent years that tremendous efforts on crime prevention have worked. There's no reputable statistician that wouldn't say that in recent years--and I don't care what happened a generation ago, because I want to know what's happening now--the majority of crimes have been going down. So I'm glad you're focusing on that, because in the past--the press just needs to look at our early Afghanistan debates--there were Conservative members who just boo-hooed root causes and said they had no effect and shouldn't be dealt with.
You mentioned the two bills coming forward. I agree with my colleague on the evidence-based.... You're certainly going to have a hard case to make there, because no reputable criminologist I know would ever suggest that large increases in mandatory minimums, or a dramatic reduction in conditional sentencing to cover a whole bunch of non-violent crimes, would ever work, especially when such changes are prejudicial to aboriginal people.
Do you or Mr. Sims have any idea what the backlog or the average condition of the Human Rights Commission is right now? Are they totally caught up with their work, or do they have a lot of work waiting?