At the time that Bill C-22came before the House there was an article in the Chronicle-Herald by Dean Beeby about the lack of money being spent. Essentially what was happening, Mr. Minister, and I think you're aware of this, was that we were trying to develop software technology that would allow us to search electronically by computers for child pornography sites. It appeared to me that from about 2005 and onwards, there had been some significant developments in that. But there was an evaluation done within the public safety department in 2008, which only became public as a result of this ATI search in 2009, that 40% of the money hadn't been spent in helping develop that and enough officers hadn't been put on it.
I'm just worried if we are going to see a similar pattern once this bill gets through, which obviously it's going to, where we're just not going to move.
A secondary question.... Do you have any idea what is happening with the development of that technology? That's the crucial part of this. Waiting for people to find sites and then report it is not, by far, the most efficient way. Identifying the sites by using the same kind of electronic wherewithal and technology that produces those sites is really the way to go. It seemed to me that we were moving quite dramatically well in that. We've done a lot of this work in our security intelligence services. I'm not quite sure why we haven't been able to get that technology up, running, and available to our police forces.