Thank you, Glen. Thank you personally for the vote of confidence that you're offering to me.
I will tell you that one of the challenges our government faced was trying to recover from the deficit reduction action plan of the previous government, which cut $900 million—almost half a billion dollars—from the RCMP and nearly $400 million from CBSA and made cuts to all of our national security agencies, including the Correctional Service of Canada, right across the board. These were massive cuts. They necessitated the elimination of police units and intelligence units that were doing really important work in this country.
When we came in, we began the long and sometimes challenging process of rebuilding that capacity and getting police services back up to the strength that they needed. I think the cuts that were made were, frankly, reckless and irresponsible, and they've had very long impacts.
For example, you eliminated all of the integrated proceeds of crime units in the country and the expertise that those units represented. There were police officers who had spent decades conducting crime investigations; we lost them—