Justice committee  Mr. Chair, I had one point of clarification of my testimony. In terms of the submarkets under illicit drugs, the actual third one is synthetic drugs. I mentioned it was pharmaceutical opiates, but it's synthetic drugs.

Justice committee  I don't have the breakdown on what we call the submarkets, the market being illicit drugs. As we reported, 57% of the market share is illicit drugs. We also see that 83% of the organized crime groups are involved in the illicit drugs business line. In terms of the exact numbers, I don't have them at my disposal right now, but by way of priority, cocaine remains the most predominant, followed by cannabis, and then followed by the pharmaceutical opiates, such as OxyContin.

Justice committee  We do, sir. I'll try to keep it short. What happened is that in 2006, the governing body for CISC, the national executive committee, identified the need to replace it. There was actually a national effort that was done and a business case was put together. We've identified a new system that would be modern and would meet the needs of all.

Justice committee  If I may—and thank you for identifying these items—as we're moving forward, I have to say that the process is becoming more and more refined. We're refining it. As I say, going into 2012 we have all provinces participating. There are actually a number of areas in the collection process that have also been further refined.

Justice committee  I don't have the information on the correlation between the countries, but it goes without saying that there is still a fairly significant correlation in the area of drugs in South America and the Caribbean, where those countries are used as a conduit for cocaine. There's also some correlation with heroin and countries in Southeast Asia.

Justice committee  Absolutely. We're seeing that these other markets remain relatively stable, based on the information we're given. In the case of ketamine, we're seeing that there is some impact and an increase in organized crime in that market. One of our duties is to inform operational bodies about which markets are growing, which are declining and which are stable.

Justice committee  In past years and right up to this year, sir, there are four categories. We're right now considering migrating to a three-category model.

Justice committee  The numbers for 2011, sir, are that we have 24 groups in category 1 and 262 in category 2; there are 121 in category 3 and 210 in category 4. We have 30 groups that we did not rate for various reasons, and we've received 82 additional groups that came in after the production of the national threat assessment.

Justice committee  No, they're primarily groups for which their sphere of influence is local. Mr. Lamontagne can probably explain that.

Justice committee  There is some difficulty in distinguishing between category 1 and category 2 because they both involve interprovincial or international activities. So we need to see to what extent these organizations dominate a market and how sophisticated they are. To ensure the process is clear, we involve all the analysts concerned across Canada.

Justice committee  If I may, the figure 16 and the 3% are referring pretty much to the same thing. It's the number of organizations that have an international reach or influence. I would simply like to make a distinction about their impact because we haven't talked about that. If their influence is local, they can have the same impact internationally.

Justice committee  I think maybe I'll add one feature here. We've testified to this, and I've testified to it as well. The fact is when a criminal organization has been recognized as such through a court process, one of the areas in which we have a problem with law enforcement is having to again demonstrate that full evidence.

Justice committee  —of collecting the evidence, presenting the evidence, and making sure it's true time and again. So the position that was advanced, I believe in May 2009, was that we were supportive of listing criminal organizations once they'd been found to be criminal organizations.

Justice committee  I fully agree with you.

Justice committee  The definition that we try to apply is exactly that; it's to get away from those three persons getting together and running a string of break and enters at a bunch of cottages and then they get away. It's really organizations—three or more—that get together and do it not on a random basis but on a continuing basis, and it has to be for the benefit of the organization, not for one person.