Thank you for the question.
This was launched in 2018. We called it the sexual assault review program. It was as a result of articles that I believe came out in The Globe and Mail that unfounded sexual assault cases were regularly not coded properly by police services.
We looked at a model from an external review team to review our cases. We had 126 unfounded-coded sexual assault cases ranging from 2010 to 2018. We set up an external review team to review those cases independently. The members of the external review team were comprised of a victim advocate, a civilian prosecutor with experience in sexual assaults, a trauma-care nurse, a representative of the SMRC and also a representative of the RCMP.
Over the course of the review, the review team commented that the investigators developed very good rapport with the victims. That also validated for us the training that was proactively adopted by the NIS in 2016: trauma-informed interviewing.
Calling the external review team was a successful model for us, and it's a model that we can replicate when required.