That surprises me. That answer is actually quite shocking. Spending 35 years as a police officer here, it's the first time I've heard that there are records being held by courthouses in other jurisdictions.
I understood there was one central depository in Canada that had the records. You sent fingerprints there, because fingerprints had to be verified. Now you're telling me that a local community or department can say that you have a criminal record, when they don't even have the authority or the jurisdiction, I understand, in Canada to give you that. That really bothers me.
I want to continue on, following on the theme of Mr. Picard.
I am concerned. The fee you're asking people to pay is a sizeable amount but not unrealistic. As a former mayor of the city of Fort St. John, we charged for a criminal record check. If you wanted to get a criminal record check, you went to the local RCMP detachment. I imagine you did the same in your municipal police force. We charged you to get that record, because there were a lot of them coming in. We needed to recuperate our costs. I imagine that you are trying to do the same with your $631.
What really starts to irk me is that now you're saying to a local person that he has to get local police record checks within the last five years. If I'm an engineer and I work in construction, I may have lived in seven or eight places in the last five years. In every one of those places, if it happened to be a municipality in Canada, there's going to be a charge for me to get that record, for you to add on to this document. If I don't have that, this document is not going work and I can't put my application in. There's an additional cost. We're probably climbing to the $1,000 mark.
I'm really surprised at your comments about the local police record checks and why they're needed. I find that very alarming.
Now, is the $631 to recuperate your costs of doing the process?