Mr. Speaker, my colleague's question does highlight a valid concern, although I have to say, one that I do not think is applicable here.
I just want to confirm what we have seen so many times with this government, of doing the photo ops on crime bills and then dumping the responsibility and the cost onto the provinces, with no cost-sharing arrangements at all. We are seeing that repeatedly, especially with regard to the rates of incarceration and how many billions of dollars that will cost the provincial levels of government.
However, in this particular case, as I said earlier in my speech, we had been doing this; the samples were being taken up until 2004 or 2005. So the system was in place across the country. The laboratories to which the samples were sent were already on contract. Most of them are private. They are not government agencies. So that system was already there. It has been languishing, but it is still being used for other purposes, because we take samples in any number of other ways. But that forensic skill is certainly in the country. We have been spending less money on it at the provincial level because we have not been able to take the samples, because we have not been able to use them. So there will be an increase in cost, but it is costs that the provinces were running, up to about five years ago.
I will make one final point, though. It is, I believe, a benefit to people who are accused that we have national standards. I am assuming and I certainly would expect that those regulations would set those national standards. I have to assume as well that they may not have always been met in the past, so we will now have national standards, which will make it much easier for our prosecutors, when they take those samples into court, to convince a judge that they are valid, that they have been done properly because they have met the national standards, and the conviction will pretty well always flow from it.