Thank you for that question.
That's obviously information I've been asked to respond to several times in the last few months, and the response is that we injected about $2 million into all of the forensic laboratory services around the 2003-2004 fiscal year. Some of that money went to firearms, some went to toxicology, and some went to our DNA area. We have seen some improvements in our toxicology and firearm turnaround times, but in the DNA area we didn't, and that has certainly been a challenge for us.
Intuitively, when we work inside the system, we look at it and say, all right, we've seen an increase in demand for DNA cases and we've actually put out more DNA cases in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006—so we were focused on getting cases out the door, but our turnaround times didn't improve.
During that period of time, as well, we changed our technology and methodology, investing quite heavily in new technology or instrumentation. And we were also charged with a couple of very large investigations, the Project Evenhanded investigation in British Columbia being one of them. Although that investigation was funded by the provincial government, the resources from British Columbia were used for overtime and the equipment and supplies we used to run our tests. It was only in the last year that we actually used some of the resources to hire temporary civilian employees. So there was a drag on our system.
I think the more fundamental issue here is our inability to provide the audit team with data that could demonstrate our ability to respond. As I mentioned, intuitively, we understood that we were seeing improvements and that we were facing some challenges, but we didn't have the ability to provide that data to the audit team.