Mr. Speaker, this goes to the heart of some of what we all have been saying, that we may well need a better collaborative federalism component to this.
The Criminal Code really is a huge federal responsibility, but a lot of things stop after we have legislated. Then it becomes a matter of the provinces and municipal police forces clawing back from the feds—that is us—some kind of a contributory role within something that should be more seamless in budgeting than it is.
Therefore, a transfer of payment system might be the way to go. Alternatively, there could be some kind of a statutory authorization within our budgetary systems for the RCMP itself, capped—we would have to figure out what that cap would be—where it could actually be paying to the municipal and provincial police forces what is needed for given investigations, without having to get specific supplementary estimates. That might be a way to think about it. It might not need a transfer system. It might simply mean the RCMP is the distributor cap for the needed money to make sure local investigations work.