Mr. Speaker, I want to give credit to the member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin because he came up with the argument initially. Obviously I supported him on it.
What we are really saying there is that we have existing provisions within the Criminal Code to deal with that kind of investigation, including if the police officer has a reasonable basis on which to arrest. All of those provisions are there and they have worked well. They have worked well whether we are dealing with minor insignificant crimes, although I always hate using that term, all the way up to very serious crimes.
Those provisions in terms of the investigative tools are in section 495 and other sections of the code. This already gives our police agencies, including our intelligence agencies, all the authority they need.
As a sidebar, it was interesting when the Commissioner of the RCMP was in front of us at one point and I pressed him on this. I asked him to tell me where he used it, because he had given a sort of offhand comment that the RCMP had used some of the sections of the anti-terrorism legislation. I asked how many times, because he said the RCMP had used it a number of times, and I think he gave me the figure of 12 or 16 times.
I pressed him on that and I can say that I pursued that right up until the very end. I have never been given a clear answer as to how many times and in what format this was done. I even have a letter from the office of the former minister for public security assuring me that when we finished I would get that. I do not have it and I do not believe I am ever going to get it, because I do not believe it ever existed, that we used this at all, ever, even in the investigation process.