Madam Speaker, just a supplementary to that question: With respect to the level of security that currently exists, or, one might say, the lack thereof, it became very obvious in the study put forward by the Senate, but other inquiries into the issue of security on the ports revealed that many private security companies, port authorities, stevedores and, as he mentioned, unions, had a disproportionately high number of employees with criminal records. That is not to suggest that anybody who has a criminal record is a security threat. However, it certainly highlights the need for a certain standard to be applied, and I would suggest nationally.
The concern here was that many of those individuals might also be susceptible to intimidation because their criminal records could be used against them or subsequently they may have had past affiliations with organized crime. I know that in the port of Montreal this is particularly acute, as we have seen in other ports as well, including those in my home province of Nova Scotia.
I would suggest that municipal police and the RCMP can and do play an active role in background checks, but does my colleague agree that a national standard has to be put in place with respect to background checks to ensure that for those who are working on the ports, whether they be in that capacity for the port authority or for the company, there has to be some standard applied to ensure that those individuals, because of their past affiliation with criminal activity and their links to organized crime, are not vulnerable either to being brought into the process of theft on the port or to becoming complicit and simply being paid not to be at a certain point at a certain time?