Forgive me if I respond in English. Following the Sophonow case, I spent two years in England and Ireland on their collusion inquiry into the six murder cases, and there wasn't
no newspaper, no radio station, no French-language television station. You'll have to excuse me—and so will my mother.
You said something that's very important, but appearances are also extremely important, particularly with regard to matters judicial and legal. And by that I mean the appearance of complete independence. Sometimes that difficult issue has to be dealt with for the sake of the ongoing reputation for independence and reliability of the national data bank, which has become such an important and integral part of crime investigation and for seeing that the innocent are acquitted.
How is that going to be done? With difficulty. You have heard of the assistance that the data bank receives from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police: security of the building, security of the samples and everything that has gone into that. That represents a great deal of extra funding that is right there, which would have to be replaced to give that independence that I think is eventually going to be essential to the operation of the data bank.
So I remain committed to the importance of appearance, so that every layperson can say, yes, it is a reliable and independent organization. But it's going to have to take into account funding in these difficult times, which we all realize are a real problem—an emergency. If you take away the RCMP assistance that the bank now receives in so many ways, the bank will require a significant amount of additional funding. That is something that has to be taken into account in arriving at the balance.