Thank you very much once again, Mr. Chair.
One of the themes in our amendments is to make sure that the new commission that's created is truly independent. We think this is very important to having the process of restoring public confidence in the RCMP proceed, and we also think it's very important for serving members of the RCMP to believe that this commission can review things without undue influence either from the commissioner or from the government.
In this section, we are removing clauses that place two restrictions on the commission launching its own independent investigations. These are highly unusual for civilian oversight bodies. We did some checking around. I have some previous experience with these. I've never seen these kinds of clauses in any other sections of the legislation setting up a civilian oversight or review body. One says that the commission may not launch investigations unless it's sure it has resources, and the other says it may not do so if there's any other “entity” investigating the same matter.
Certainly, we heard from the previous police complaints commissioner that he felt that sometimes matters arise whereby having the commission proceed to investigate would actually save a lot of money, rather than having to set up an independent commission to look into those matters. However, had he been under this restriction, he might not have been able to launch such an investigation.
We also heard from Mr. Mukherjee on Monday that he sometimes felt that oversight bodies investigate different aspects of the same matter. He pointed to the investigations of the G-20 matters in Toronto, which were investigated from several different perspectives because they were joint operations of different police forces. What he said very clearly to us on Monday was that it might be useful sometimes to have different aspects investigated by different oversight bodies, and that he would not like to see this ruled out from the beginning in the legislation.