Public Safety committee  Yes, I reviewed the report yesterday and I spoke to Superintendent Busson about it. Essentially, there should be very little that's edited from the report. On my first review of the report I noticed one clause that would link old identity to new identity, so obviously we'd have to take that out.

Public Safety committee  I would suspect that we could complete that this week. Again, I want to reiterate that I've only read it once, and I would like to take some time to make sure, but I know there was one sentence in the act that caught my attention earlier in the report, and I said, “No, a person would be able to link old and new identity.

Public Safety committee  I would suspect that Mr. Bird would be able to see it. I'm not sure if he's read it at this point.

Public Safety committee  No, I'll make the final decision on that.

Public Safety committee  One area I see as a gap is that there are, as you are aware, quite a number of cases brought in under the Witness Protection Program Act where we're actually assisting other law enforcement agencies. We essentially can't ensure any consistency in that across the board or control what takes place with an individual up to that point.

Public Safety committee  You're right. The difficulty is that there's only one agency in the country that can provide secure documentation, and that comes under the Witness Protection Program Act, the federal act, and it's the RCMP that looks after securing the secure identification. In the process right now, when these other agencies choose to actually move somebody with a secure identification, they're forced, basically, to come into the program.

Public Safety committee  I thank you for your comments. Yes, you're very correct that it's a high-risk program. And we know that we're not going to develop a perfect system. One area where we have spent a lot of time is training, especially since 2003. We now have a complete training package on human source development and human source handling.

Public Safety committee  Thank you. I'll be very brief. Good morning. It's my pleasure to appear before you again today. As you're aware, I'm the director general of the drugs and organized crime program for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. As such, I oversee the source witness protection program as administered by the RCMP.

Public Safety committee  Of the 700, I believe very close to 100% would be ours. Of the 300, it would be the other agencies. We normally take direction from the police agency that we're dealing with. If the Montreal city police didn't request that we take the person in and move him to a different location, we wouldn't.

Public Safety committee  No, we don't supervise them, but we do work very closely. We allow them to come on our course if they are interested in coming on our course. We have varying degrees of cooperation.

Public Safety committee  Yes, there is, and part of that involves an interview and an assessment by the witness protection coordinator. Only the person who is actually trained in that field will undertake the final decision. We have a number of people who are informants and who want to come forward and volunteer to be a police agent, but a lot of those people are screened out for a number of different reasons.

Public Safety committee  Yes, you could have access to it.

Public Safety committee  We would actually have hundreds. Any time another agency approaches us and they request secure documents only, but they say, no, we want to do the...we'll look after the person, we'll look after all the obligations in the supervision. They are technically in the witness protection program.

Public Safety committee  One of the other central themes was that the program is shrouded in secrecy. That's not the case. In fact, after the newspaper articles came out, I gave very lengthy interviews to, I think, three or maybe four reporters—interviews an hour to an hour and a half long—in which I answered virtually every question they posed.

Public Safety committee  Not under the current format. We don't highlight any cases.