What I want is a message from this committee back to the government, really, that we just have to stop doing this. I remember meeting with Mr. Lunn in the last Parliament, and Mr. Easter at that point. Both had been very extensively involved in the issue. It's quite clear, and I got the message from both of them, in their dealings with the attorneys general across the country, that everybody wants to do this. It's a question of working out the mechanics between the two levels of government.
This has gone on now, Mr. Chairman, and I think we all know this, for over five years. It's in excess of that now that we know we need this kind of a system. Mr. Ménard's point is well taken. We saw the same problem in the United States. I don't think they've resolved it adequately across the whole of the country, and we certainly haven't even started on it.
So what I'd like coming out of this is I would like us to do something. I don't want to just let it go back without that message coming from this committee. I don't know if we have to do a report as part of sending the bill back, but we badly need to do this. I know there are problems with the provinces. We saw that in the letter from Saskatchewan. Certainly we've heard it from the Province of Quebec in terms of the concern over provincial jurisdiction here. Having said that, it seems to me that there's been enough discussion between the provincial and federal levels that in fact they know how to do it.
Let me throw it back at the parliamentary secretary. Why don't you go and fix it?
In all seriousness, Mr. MacKenzie, I'm not hearing that the government is at a stage yet of having a government bill come forward that would put in place what the federal government needs to do and then have that agreed upon by all the provinces. Maybe you could help us in that regard.
To answer your basic question, I simply want a message going back from this committee that we recognize the significance of this.
Mr. Wallace, on the point you made about some of the limits you put in in terms of how long the person has to be disappeared before we do it, it would be interesting to see what those are, because the scope of what we're doing may be substantially less than if we take every single missing person in the country from the day they go missing. So the scope of what we may have to do may be substantially less, and that may get both levels of government to move more quickly, since they won't be faced with as much financial burden.