Statement made on 14 June 2011 by Senator Joan Fraser
Hon. Joan Fraser:
Honourable senators, my question is for the Leader of the Government in the Senate.
I am going back to the Auditor General's report, which, as the leader will recall, included some distressing news about the RCMP and the difficulties that the police force is facing. It talked, in particular, about serious backlogs.
Under the ironically named Canadian Criminal Real Time Identification Services, the backlog for criminal record updates has more than quadrupled since 2006. The estimated time to process a criminal record update is now 14 months for English updates and 36 months for French updates. For a new record, the average time to process was 27 working days, which the Auditor General observes, with understatement, is significantly higher than the optimal response time of two hours that the RCMP expects to achieve one of these days.
The response of the government to the various comments in this section of the Auditor General's report consisted of a lot of promises to think about things. My very favourite says that once two ongoing studies are concluded, they "will provide the foundation for future deliberations and discussions surrounding possible delivery options."
Apart from pushing paper around, what will the government actually do to solve these backlogs, which, as the Auditor General says, have a deleterious impact on investigations and costs?
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