Thank you for that question.
I think you are reading that correctly on the basis that 15% of the delay is not an unreasonable amount of time. Just because we use the word “delay” doesn't mean it's unreasonable delay. In terms of 15% of the time taken to process a mutual legal assistance request, there has to be time involved in processing it. I believe the Auditor General—they can correct me if I'm wrong—felt that this was a reasonable amount of time.
With respect to the extradition aspect, 30% sounds like more, and it is, because extradition is a lot more legally cumbersome. It involves court proceedings and it involves a period where advice has to be provided to the Minister of Justice for him to make a decision with respect to whether to order surrender. That has defined timelines within the legislation. We are meeting the requirements of the defined timelines, and that would be the 30% time that we're using.
We're looking to all the other areas where, as was indicated earlier, we don't have direct control but where we may have some influence. We work regularly with a whole series of partners, treaty partners. By way of example, the countries that are making requests to us and to whom we're making requests are domestic partners like the RCMP, where we could continue to work to give more training. This a bit of a technical legal area, and it's very important to the RCMP in processing their investigations to get our assistance. Sometimes it's complicated and they don't always understand how to do it. We're working on having better training in order to assist them to make their requests more easily so that we'll be able to process them more effectively. In addition to that, we work with prosecution services across the country. Because there are so many different partners involved in this, it's sometimes difficult to control the whole time process.