I'll talk very briefly about the three cases, because I normally don't go public until I go public with my document.
One of the three dealing with Mr. Ian Bush is coming to its conclusion, and I hope to have a report imminently in that regard. The Vanderhoof file is turning out to be a little more complex and has taken a bit more time. Both of these are incidents of homicide. It's a police shooting. Whenever there is a police shooting that results in death, obviously we're very interested in those. In those two instances I issued a chair-initiated complaint to look at them. The other one, which is the income trust case, is still at the investigative stage, so it'll take a little more time to do.
With those kinds of cases where there is a chair-initiated complaint, I do make my report public. The report in its entirety will be made public, and that means I do an interim report. If I find fault, there is a commissioner's response to it in my final.... I'll have them translated then, and they'll be put on the web. Those will be public documents.
The other one, which is easier for me to deal with, is draft legislation. I've been in the public safety area for over 33 years now. One of the ironies is that I was the former senior assistant deputy minister in the department responsible for policing national security emergency management at various times. When I took this job on, obviously I was quite familiar with the RCMP. I looked at the legislation and I looked at my counterparts' legislation across the country. The first thing you do is brief yourself up. I found the legislation had markedly fallen behind the times.
As well, I have appeared before parliamentary committees dealing with the organized crime legislation, the anti-terrorism legislation, and administratively have helped the previous minister and her predecessors dealing with integrated models of policing to make the police more effective. What struck me when I ended up in the job was that in the whole structure of how we have improved public safety, what was remiss and left out was clearly the review mechanisms, and they were quite archaic.
So I looked at the best practices across the country. The reason is that if you're a citizen in this country, depending on what province you're in and what force you run into, your access in terms of a complaint or some sort of an oversight review mechanism varies significantly. I thought I had a responsibility here, because the RCMP is the only police force that's present in all of the provinces and territories. It's the only one that's nationally present. It is in eight provinces as the provincial police force. It is, of course, in over 200 municipalities, and it's on a large number of native reserves as well.
There's no other police force like it, and it's at least 30% of the total policing complement in this country. If you were in B.C., serendipitously, 70% of the policing is with the RCMP. If you have the Vancouver city police, it goes to the provincial model, and the powers aren't the same. They have an ability to monitor investigations. They have the power to direct another police force and to do an investigation. There are differences, and the RCMP uniquely does certain kinds of things. They have a lead for national security and certainly transnational organized crime. This brings you into prevention instances more often than not, where the activity is not public. They have been doing an investigation of all these people. So people don't know and therefore they cannot complain.
I looked at that and I said, you need to have a model. Every minister who contracts for the RCMP to do municipal or provincial policing for them can look out there and say that the federal model is akin to the provincial model and the powers are there. I took inspiration from what I saw occurring across the country. Others are the SIU model--the special investigative model. They have a special unit that comes in and does that for police shootings that result in serious injury or death. Alberta is doing a variation of that. The provinces now are taking up the cudgel where the federal government has failed to step forward and address it. They're finding ways to hold the RCMP accountable through provincial legislation, which, as a federalist myself, I think you may want to look at and consider.
I put that model on the web in November 2006 and I shared it previously with the minister and with Justice O'Connor. Justice O'Connor was looking at national security. National security investigations are no different from organized crime. It's the same issue. It's covert, serendipitous techniques, year-long wiretaps, and so on. You can have one model that would address this, in fact, and I think it would give us credibility.
Regarding Mr. Poilievre's comment about the situation in New Brunswick, my model that I put forward would call for us, when I do a report, to send a copy of that report not only to the Minister of Public Safety and the commissioner but to the provincial minister responsible for that contract police force. He or she could then answer in the legislature as to what it is and could then carry on a dialogue with the commanding officer who is providing that service to them. That would have been useful in that particular instance that was referenced.