Deputy Commissioner Sweeney, I'd like to continue with the investigation the public accounts committee did into the RCMP. Superintendent Christian Picard in that testimony said something that was quite poignant, and I'd like to read it:
When I joined the RCMP, as with any member of the RCMP, I swore to uphold the law and to respect it. I ask myself this question every day: if the RCMP does not respect the Access to Information Act, who will? For five years I made sure I respected the spirit of the act. Of course, this meant that I fought epic battles with senior managers. That was not always easy within a paramilitary organization like the RCMP. You try to protect the organization against itself, but that is often perceived as being disloyal to the organization.
In later testimony it came out that when Superintendent Picard had tried to do what was right, soon afterward he was seconded to Africa to the Ivory Coast, and when I asked him what happened when he came back, he said they didn't have a job for him. He stayed home.
I understand that four out of the five key whistle-blowers during the RCMP investigation are no longer with the force. They did a tremendous service. We're all proud of those officers. They did what was right and they tried to uphold the rules and the law. They knew they were going to pay a personal cost and they all felt that it was worth the personal cost for the greater public service that they had made by coming forward.
As a result, there were a number of reports. You had the parliamentary committee reviewing this for about a year and a half; 31 recommendations were unanimously passed by the committee. The government finally did the Brown report. Two former commissioners took part in the panel that wrote the Brown report. It was called “Rebuilding the Trust--Report of the Task Force on Governance and Cultural Change in the RCMP”, 49 recommendations. The deadline for all of them to be acted upon was this past December.
Of the 49 Brown report recommendations and the 31 recommendations unanimously passed by the parliamentary committee, how many have been acted upon?