Thank you very much, Mr. Silver.
As far as the High River incidents go, you're absolutely right. Nobody was charged that I'm aware of. I believe the top commander, or someone near the top, basically lost his or her job over it, but there were no charges that I'm aware of either, and that is wrong.
They used the excuse when they first went in that they were searching for bodies, possibly, but they broke into houses. They broke into them, and windows and doors were smashed out of houses that weren't even affected by the flood in that town. They said that when they went into any of the homes, whether they were flooded or not, a lot of people had taken their firearms out of their cabinets and had laid them up on the beds in case the water came up like that. They said they couldn't just leave them. Well, they shouldn't have been in there to start with, so I will agree with you on that.
The one point that I wanted to clarify is on giving more powers to the RCMP or whatever. I'm not going to condone that in all situations without there being proper oversight, but you used it in the same tone as, say, giving government more power. Giving the RCMP more power—or whatever force—doesn't give the government more power. That needed to be clarified.
But today, comparing High River to the terrorism threat that is out there today, whether we want to admit it or not.... We had a gentleman here today at the earlier meetings who said that.... Maybe it was last night. We've had so many meetings this week that I'm confusing them. Anyway, he had been in some countries over there, and Afghanistan was one of them, where terrorism is an everyday thing, so the level there is much higher than here, but just because it's much lower here doesn't mean that we can ignore it.
The FLQ back in the seventies has been brought up here tonight. There probably wasn't a lot of that kind of thing going on, that illegal activity, until 9/11 changed everything in 2001. Since then, we can't stick our heads in the sand and pretend that it isn't a threat out there, even though it's not as severe, so how can we give the powers that be—the RCMP, CSIS, or whoever—the power to investigate and pull people off the street and lock them up when they think there's a deliberate threat there?