I don't want to interrupt but really, in all honesty, I think we have to be brutally honest here, I think we have a problem.
Even if the committee wants to pass this bill, in the evidence that the correctional officer has tabled before us, he has said that his office estimates that by April 2012, CSC had authorized more than 8,600 individual ETA permits, involving 180 life sentence offenders within three years of parole eligibility. If you break that down, in the last two years that's somewhere around 4,000 a year.
We had the Parole Board before us the other day. They couldn't give us the numbers.
A private member's bill that requires the expenditure of money would have to have a royal prerogative and it therefore would have to be a government bill.
I think we could be into a problem here even if we support this. The promoter of the bill couldn't give us the cost. Even if we, with the best of desires, want to pass this bill, we could run into a problem when it's reported back to the House, that it does not have royal prerogative. That is my suspicion as to what is going to happen.
What more needs to be done on what CSC is doing if the bill doesn't pass? It can't satisfy your concerns—which is the wrong word—but how can it be helpful?