Madam Speaker, I listened with interest to my colleague's remarks and noted that the focus tended to be on how to simultaneously govern the RCMP as public servants and also as police officers. It is a challenge that municipalities, provinces, and other authorities right across this country have insofar as police having duties which are completely different from the civil service in terms of the management structure, as well as the execution of those duties, and the powers those duties contain.
Would the member opposite not agree that we cannot treat them as civil servants, pure and simple, precisely because of the extraordinary powers that they have? Therefore, we need to custom fit a separate collective agreement around the police component of the RCMP workforce in order to make sure the law enforcement components of it are treated separately. Subsequent to that, if he acknowledges that, is it not for the RCMP itself and management to set out the terms and effectiveness of those relationships and not necessarily something Parliament should impose from afar?