Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My thanks to all the witnesses, for both their passion their expertise.
Mr. Neve, you opened your presentation by indicating that states have a positive duty to preserve human rights. I certainly agree with this premise, as do all members, I am sure, on both sides of this committee. But one of the overriding mechanisms that I've heard from all of your presentations has to do with civilian oversight. We've heard different issues regarding a perceived lack of oversight. We also heard from Mr. Kennedy, from the RCMP Complaints Commission. He mentioned the legislative restraints and budgetary and funding restraints necessary for that oversight body to do its job properly. And Mr. Holland, to judge by his questions, certainly agrees with Mr. Kennedy.
The disconnect that I have, however, is that civilian oversight, by its very definition and by the way it's set up, reviews matters after the fact, not dissimilar to how the two judicial inquiries did their job, and not unlike what we're doing here today. We're analyzing what happened and what went wrong, months and years after the events. If these oversight committees were integrated, and if they were given all the budgets they required, how would that prevent a specific occurrence, which happens immediately? The decisions concerning these four individuals didn't take weeks and months and years; they were made within minutes, or certainly within hours. So how could an oversight committee—if empowered, as you were lobbying for it to be empowered—prevent the unfortunate events that happened to these four individuals?
I'm hoping that Mr. Neve, and perhaps Mr. Allmand, might be able to help me out here.