Public Safety committee  I think they were designed for correctional purposes. I think that what is off the shelf is probably what....

Public Safety committee  I can't think of anything right off the bat.

Public Safety committee  There may be some applications, some operational requirement for this, and that might be a fairly common way to do it. When people phone up, if they want that extra level of assurance that it is the person who they want to talk to who's at the end of the line, then that can be im

Public Safety committee  I would say not, no.

Public Safety committee  According to the business case that the Province of Quebec was building, it would be a cheap option.

Public Safety committee  If I could add to that, because you asked what kinds of technologies there were, there's alcohol monitoring and also drug monitoring.

Public Safety committee  In the case of alcohol and maybe drugs, they can determine from your sweat whether you've had any, so there are monitors you can place. I don't know how effective they are. I have come across that. If that's one of the conditions of release, for instance, then that's an operation

Public Safety committee  I don't have empirical evidence of that. I'd have to look into it. I know it can be quite good in certain circumstances. If you have a very noisy environment, it doesn't work so well. The perfect system is never out there. It is an option that can be looked at. I think noise and

Public Safety committee  Yes, it could.

Public Safety committee  I've looked at the bracelet technology for the most part.

Public Safety committee  What I've been exposed to is the application for curfew purposes mostly. That's what I've heard about. I know that in Quebec they were looking at a set of options that would help them do electronic monitoring. Biometrics was one of the things—it's not on the market—that they were

Public Safety committee  I'm saying that the technology is there that allows you to identify somebody through their voice. If I'm not mistaken, I think some jurisdictions might be using that, maybe not in Canada, maybe elsewhere, but these are possibilities. You phone at a certain time and the individual

Public Safety committee  I haven't come across any small Canadian companies that are trying to make a go of this. I haven't come across anything in my overview of the technology.

Public Safety committee  Yes, I can comment a little bit on reaching, at certain hours...random phone calls to a household. One of the problems is that one can't always identify the person answering the phone, and in a family setting you really don't know who you're talking to if there are many people in

Public Safety committee  I know some of the companies are quite large; they have absorbed smaller companies and are now offering the service. How big are the companies? An example is 3M. There are only about half a dozen companies or so that—