Public Safety committee  No. As I mentioned earlier, you have to have a 216 form in order to open a criminal record.

Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  No. I think it would be fair to say that certainly if we had more resources, more funding, it would allow us to move things forward more quickly. But at the same time, we understand there are many other priorities within the RCMP, within national police services, and also elsewhere within government.

Public Safety committee  You know, usually it's between probably $12,000 and $16,000 for one LiveScan machine for civil screening. Right? That's what we're talking about here. Depending on the police service, maybe one is enough. I'm not sure. Toronto, for example, may want to have more than one. That's the cost for the hardware.

Public Safety committee  Are you talking about doing the live scan, this part of it, for the civil screening?

Public Safety committee  That's hard to say, because there are police services and there are also RCMP detachments, OPP detachments.... I don't off the top of my head have that.

Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  I don't think so.

Public Safety committee  That would be the responsibility of individual police services. Now, I will add that when you think about the time savings from using this automated thing, they're actually saving time. There are certainly efficiencies compared to what they're spending right now doing things manually.

Public Safety committee  They have to go through the same process. They eventually have to get into the automated system either way. You can imagine that if you put them in at the front end, we save all that long manual work that has to go into the system. The system is handling that right now.

Public Safety committee  You mean the vulnerable sector ones? Right now, if we get it today, it's about nine weeks before we hit it. That's a massive increase. Instead of getting 130 a month, we're getting almost 8,000. We've upped the number of people working on that, and we've reallocated people to it.

Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  There are two factors. First, we know that sometimes they don't get sent in. Sometimes you will have some story in the media saying a certain person was sentenced and had no previous convictions, yet everybody in that community knows that the person has a record. Then we go back and check our records and we find the police never submitted it.

Public Safety committee  I'll refer a little bit to earlier comments I made. As in any major project, I think it was very difficult for those folks who started this to predict exactly what complexities they would run into. There's no doubt that as this project has moved along, we have learned things. And other issues have come in, including things such as changes in legislation, which have all added to the complexity of it.

Public Safety committee  This is all an issue about public safety. It's the only way for us to ensure that somebody who has, in particular, had a pardon for a sexual offence and goes and does a legal name change--which is very easy to do.... It's the only way for us to ensure that those people get fingerprinted and that we catch them in the process.