Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you to all the witnesses for appearing today.
I'd like to start by thanking the people here and those who are not who have been the victims of the failures that we're talking about today for their courage to come forward, and say how profoundly sorry I am that Mr. Elmaati, Mr. Almalki, Mr. Nureddin, and Mr. Arar went through the terrible ordeal they went through. Ms. Pither, thank you for bringing that to light, just in terms of the personal story, because I think when we're talking about oversight on some of these elements we can get lost in the theoretical concepts and forget what the real-life consequences are for Canadian citizens who went through horrors we can never imagine.
I want to start, if I could, on the issue of oversight. We had Mr. Kennedy before our committee talking about the two handcuffs that he has to tie his hand behind his back. I'm going to come to Ms. Heafey first, if I can, because as chair of two different bodies with this responsibility, particularly the public complaints commission, Mr. Kennedy is bound on the one hand by legislative restraints that you were referring to and on the other hand by a lack of resources and funding. In fact, not only are we seeing the government not implement Justice O'Connor's recommendations to enhance oversight, which were reinforced by Mr. Iacobucci, but we're now actually seeing funding cuts. We saw a massive reduction in the additional money that had been given to Mr. Kennedy's office.
I wonder if you can talk about the implications of cutting that funding. I think you very clearly spelled out the legislative restraints, but I'm wondering if you can talk about the fiscal restraints and what this loss of money means, and how the fiscal side of things presents a challenge.