Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, gentlemen, for your presentations, and in particular, for your candid responses to questions from our colleagues today.
I'd like to adjust the focus a little bit. We've talked a lot about sentencing and mandatory minimums, which I certainly acknowledge have a role to play, more on the deterrence and denunciation side. Two of you, Assistant Commissioner Macintyre and Chief Superintendent MacRae, raised sort of tangential issues.
Assistant Commissioner, in your opening comments, I thought you were referring to lawful access legislation. You talked about, for example, electronic surveillance. I think you talked about certain legislative and judicial obstacles that make it difficult, or more difficult than perhaps it needs to be, for you to conduct investigations and then undertake successful prosecutions.
There's been some discussion about various investments in technologies--hyperspectral imaging sensors, for example--that have been used, for which funding was then, I think, cut off or not made available. I'm wondering if you can give us some suggestions regarding lawful access legislation and electronic surveillance, which I certainly think needs to be modernized and updated to give you the tools you need to conduct investigations against increasingly sophisticated criminal enterprises.
In the disclosure piece, you referred to obstacles, or the burden that disclosure represents, I think, particularly regarding relevance. I don't think anybody is suggesting we take away the right of an accused person to know the case against him or her, but it perhaps has become an unreasonable burden now, or it is done in a way that takes valuable resources away from policing and diverts them to photocopying and so on. I'm wondering if you could touch on that.
And then, if we have time, I want Chief Superintendent MacRae to tell us more about some of the prevention and youth at risk initiatives in your community. I found those very interesting.