Justice committee  In relation to Ms. Jennings' second question, I would think that would be a question that would be asked of the Canada Border Services Agency.

Justice committee  I think Chapter 15 concerns the decision to prosecute.

Justice committee  Yes, but remember, criminal investigations are conducted by the police forces.

Justice committee  I'm not really in a position to answer that. I wouldn't characterize the charges that were laid against her as criminal charges. These were charges laid pursuant to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which is--

Justice committee  Yes, that's clear. But all regulatory offences contain consequences in terms of fines or imprisonment.

Justice committee  I answered this questioned a few minutes ago, but I'll answer it again. I mentioned that under subsection 117(3), there is a requirement for the Attorney General's consent, and that authority has been delegated to the Director of Public Prosecutions. We have a deskbook called th

Justice committee  We have the capacity throughout the country to provide a prosecution in both official languages.

Justice committee  We have arrangements with all the provinces. We call them major-minor arrangements. What that means is that we look at the charges against individuals and we determine the major charge against the individual. If it's a charge that is normally prosecuted by the province, they will

Justice committee  There were 60,000 cases handled by our prosecutors.

Justice committee  That would include new files and also files that are continued from the previous year, because, unfortunately, files are often not completed in one year. When you're dealing with complex cases, they can go on for a couple of years.

Justice committee  The majority of our work is drug-related. I believe—and Mr. Fortin will correct me if I'm wrong—in terms of money expenditures, about 77% of our resources are spent on drug prosecutions.

Justice committee  We do a large number of what we call “regulatory” prosecutions. Those would be any of the many federal statutes that contain offences. The primary ones we do would be revenue prosecutions, Fisheries Act prosecutions, and customs prosecutions.

Justice committee  You've probably read that at present we have approximately 450 staff prosecutors and we employ about 800 agents across the country. We're required to retain agents—they aren't working for us full-time, usually—because we cover virtually every courthouse in the country and it's to

Justice committee  Your first question dealt with the division of labour between agents and staff counsel, I assume.

Justice committee  We can do a cost per case, but averages are very misleading. We do a sorting or analysis of our caseload, and we categorize them by level of complexity. We have low, moderate, high, and what we call mega-cases. A low case, for example, is a simple possession case. It doesn't take