It's extremely important, Mr. Spengemann.
I had the opportunity to meet, not long ago, with the cross-cultural round table, which is a group representing the vast diversity of Canadian society. The membership changes from time to time, but the principle of the committee has been in place since about 2002 or 2003, somewhere in that period of time. Around the table, there were representatives of various faiths and ethnic and cultural heritages. They all made the point, I think unanimously, that a far more serious effort needs to be made at counter-radicalization to violence, and that there are interesting lessons to be learned from other countries and from academics about what works and what doesn't work. They applauded the government's commitment to create a new national office.
There are various local initiatives across the country. The City of Montreal has a particularly good one. Calgary has one. Toronto has another way of doing it, Edmonton, and so forth, but they all tend to operate in isolated silos. It would be more useful to the country if we found a way to link all these networks together, so we proposed to establish a national office. We are, hopefully, now in the final stages of attracting the senior adviser who will be the face and voice of that office.
The objective is to get the very best techniques from Canada and around the world that can help us identify who is vulnerable to being enticed into a pattern of behaviour that ultimately leads to a descending spiral, and at the end of it, violence. It takes a lot of good, solid scientific research, and we intend to fund that. It's an initiative that will be done in close collaboration with several federal departments and agencies, and also our counterparts provincially and municipally.
The goal is to make Canada the very best in the world at recognizing it and then knowing how best to intervene at the right place, with the right people, at the right time, to head off a tragedy before it happens.