Public Safety committee  I'll have to turn to Ian and Brigitte.

Public Safety committee  Is it in the form of a certificate?

Public Safety committee  No.

Public Safety committee  I think, practically, that might be prohibitive for every applicant.

Public Safety committee  Yes, but it wouldn't change what the Americans already have in their database. If they already have that in their database, it won't mean anything to them.

Public Safety committee  I am not sure that's under the Criminal Records Act. I would have to check. I'd be happy to get back to you on that.

Public Safety committee  No, I don't have any data about that.

Public Safety committee  It's hard to know if anything went wrong. We estimated how many people would have those records. Let's remember that the last charges were back in the late 1960s, so a number of years have gone by. We did think to ourselves that there are people who may just not want to bother. T

Public Safety committee  In the past it wouldn't have been relevant whether it was public or private possession, so they wouldn't have been able to.

Public Safety committee  Now you have a very clear law and if they are charged with that, that crime will stay.

Public Safety committee  As we've said, it's very difficult to know who has possession for cannabis offences, so we can't just go into a database and say this is how many offences there are. We've extrapolated from statistics collected by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, and their figure is upwa

Public Safety committee  I'm not sure where the 500,000 came from. The figures we have used are 250,000.

Public Safety committee  That's correct.

Public Safety committee  We're still before committee and we don't have the final bill, so I can't actually say right now what the cost will be.

Public Safety committee  As I said, we drew our number from the Public Prosecution Service of Canada and the number of convictions they have.