I think you're right in saying that it would be difficult, but I don't think it would be impossible or even unmanageable. It clearly would require a lot of cooperation between the provinces and the federal government. A lot of it currently exists already, between police forces and between the RCMP and the provinces and those people in each province who might be responsible for police services and so on, but it's primarily basically conceived of and administered as a police collaboration program.
I think the point I'm making, and it's a point that others have made, is that it has to be a little more than that. It can't all be dictated and controlled by police tactical or strategic goals. It can't always be competing against other police costs. It has to be treated as an independent program.
I believe it's possible to coordinate them. I also think there's a trap in thinking that the measure should always be to relocate the witnesses. Oftentimes a very temporary relocation is sufficient. Oftentimes simply a new identity is sufficient. In my view, this is perhaps not used often enough.
Sometimes when you deal with police forces and police services within the country you hear that they don't feel they have access to that very simple service, which is to create a new identity for someone. You don't need the RCMP to do this. You need a place where you can actually create a new identity and make sure that it will be protected. Oftentimes just that would be sufficient.
There are a lot of witnesses who would rather take their chances.... And I'm not necessarily talking about the head of one major criminal organization. We cannot just be thinking about those stereotypical witnesses. There are lots of witnesses who would take their chances, who would have the courage to come forward, many of them innocent witnesses who are not linked to organized crime or anything, if simply we could just facilitate things a bit--short-term assistance, relocation until the trial is over, a bit of financial assistance to cover the costs of all of these measures we have to take. Sometimes they will need, for instance, private protection from a private security agency to secure their house or whatever. They might need a new identity.
So a whole range of things can be done, and it cannot be a matter of either qualifying for the heavy-duty, extreme program, which involves relocation, or nothing. The advantage of having a national program would be that it would make each police service more responsible for taking the right kind of action.
I think one of the deplorable situations currently is that too many of those decisions are primarily made—and we all understand why—on the basis of costs as opposed to the basis of the protection of the rights of the people who are caught in those situations, whether they themselves are criminals or not.
Again, I think the statistics that have been presented to the committee will tell you that, yes, there are several criminals who were benefiting from that program, but their relatives were also benefiting from the program and in need of protection--as are a whole bunch of witnesses and collaborators of justice who basically have no association with organized crime and right now are left to their own means. The bias oftentimes within law enforcement, not just in Canada but elsewhere, is that, well, these people will be left alone; you compel them to testify, they will do so, and organized crime will understand that they had no choice. But that's not reality.