The $83 billion comes from work done by Justice Canada. It's used a lot by Minister Nicholson, and I think it's good use of data.
It is limited in some ways. It's based on really two core bits of information. One is what's called, by me, the “victimization” survey, which is the general social survey that basically talks to a sample of some 25,000 adult Canadians about whether they've been the victims of eight or nine specific crimes. Those include the common violent crimes and the most important property crimes, but they don't include fraud, for instance.
They then multiply the estimates of those crime levels by estimates of what a civil court would pay an average victim. It doesn't include companies and it doesn't include the sort of secondary victims that you're talking about.
I think it's about at the limit of our current methodological sophistication. In my book I use American data because it's a bit better than ours, but it comes basically to the same conclusions. My stuff also includes drunk driving, which is where more people are killed than in homicide in Canada and where people get injured.
But, you know, it's a ballpark figure, and if you started including these others, you would increase that figure. I'm not against somebody doing it.
I want us to use the $83 billion because it has recognition by our current federal government and I think it's good.