The government has said, with respect to other departments, not to worry about front-line service because the cuts are all going to impact the back office. It seems to me that in your business, the back office is really, in many ways, and more and more and more, the nerve centre of the operation. It's not police officers on the beat, per se; it's this bureaucracy of analysts and experts who are tracking crime across interprovincial borders and internationally and so on and so forth.
I have a hard time squaring in my mind the fact that on the one hand we have budget cuts to the RCMP and on the other hand we have the increasing complexity of crime.
If you look at financial crime alone, it takes months and months and months and years to really get to the point where you can charge individuals because what they're doing is so complex. Financial transactions are so complex. There's that. There's the whole issue of counterfeiting, which is now exploding. I've seen the statistics. We've gone beyond printing bills in a basement—and in saying ”we”, that's the royal “we”—to tracking fraudulent counterfeit consumer products, electronic products that are now finding their way into aircraft electronics and so on.
The world is becoming more globalized. To me I see it a bit like the health care issue. Costs are being driven not so much by salaries but just by the complexity of the industry, if you want to call it that. If you start to try to cut by rationalizing, someone's going to get hurt. In the health care system, if you say that you're just going to keep costs constant, in the face of more expensive drugs, people are going to die just from waiting too long, perhaps, for a procedure. I'm very skeptical about the ability to squeeze more out of the policing system at a time when we need policing more, maybe.
You talked about some initial economies, and I'm sure you're right, but maybe they're just initial economies, and once those are done you can't repeat those economies year after year after year. Once you've restructured, you can't keep restructuring every year and saving that way. I'd like your comment on that.