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"My father's family, all his brothers and him, were in the military. My mother's family were all school teachers and nurses, so I was brought up in families that had a sense of working for the public." — Brian Saunders and economic prosecutions and manage- ment branch, and George Dolhai, who is in charge of the drug, national secu- rity, and northern prosecutions branch. Proulx and Dolhai also reveal an early interest in prosecution work, although Dolhai spent two years in litigation at McCarthy and McCarthy, as it was then, before seeing the "light." Proulx stepped right into it, almost. After a year and a half at the DoJ's office of national strat- egy for drug prosecutions following her 1990 call to the bar in Ottawa, Proulx joined the federal prosecution team at the Elgin Street courthouse, a stone's throw from Parliament Hill, and spent 10 years prosecuting "all kinds of cases, drugs, conspiracies, wiretaps, criminal organi- zations" before heading back to Justice Department headquarters a few blocks away on Wellington Street. But the office's location reflects a sen- sitive aspect of the status of the PPSC, which Prime Minister Stephen Harper heralded during the campaign for the 2006 election that squeaked him in as prime minister. The proposed public prosecutors' office was one of Harper's major campaign planks while he fought to oust the former Liberal government, scandal-plagued as it was in 2005 over allegations of kickbacks and missing federal money during the sponsor- ship affair that led to the Liberal defeat and eventual criminal charges against a former bureaucrat and party insiders in the Quebec wing. The new Public Prosecution Service of Canada was to be completely independent, hived off from the DoJ, with its budget approved sepa- rately by Parliament, and free to conduct prosecutions covering a range of federal statutes and Criminal Code provisions with no chance of cabinet interference. Yet, four years later, the service remains physically embedded in Justice Department offices. Following a two-year delay of Saunders' confirmation, Proulx and Dolhai remain "acting" deputy direc- tors, still awaiting their official confirma- tion by a committee to be composed of Saunders, the deputy minister of justice, and a nominee from the Federation of Law Societies of Canada. "We've deter- mined that staffing moves slowly in the public service," jokes Saunders. The director of the PPSC is appointed for a seven-year term with a salary that cannot be reduced, and he or she cannot be fired without a resolution from the House of Commons. The auditor general, by comparison, is appointed for a 10-year term and cannot be removed without resolutions from both the Commons and the Senate. As well, despite the budget- process separation from the department, 32 JULY 2010 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com Saunders indirectly concedes he must go through the attorney general to seek spe- cial funding in unexpected or unusual circumstances. An example is the effect at least one bill among the government's wave of tough-on-crime laws will have on the service. Defence counsel had earlier claimed that legislation Justice Minister Rob Nicholson tabled to implement mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, including possession of relatively small amounts of marijuana, would inevi- tably lead to more congestion in the courts as one of the tools in the plea-bargaining chest was eliminated. Saunders confirms the prosecution service also expects more contested trials because of the expansion of mandatory minimums, and says the service had already conducted an analysis that predicted a need for 25 to 35 new prosecutors. His request for additional financing to beef up the prosecutorial ranks — now numbering 482 on the payroll plus 704 legal agents from the private sec- tor — had to go through Nicholson in order for Saunders to ask for and, it turns out, obtain Treasury Board approval. Coincidentally, only a day after Saunders' interview for this article, Nicholson appeared at the Commons justice com- mittee to verbally confirm what he had already said in a letter to the committee's chairman, Conservative MP Ed Fast: the PPSC would be getting new money, if and when the mandatory minimum bill becomes law. But Nicholson's letter, obtained by Canadian Lawyer, fails to mention one of the most politically sensitive aspects of the initiative: it will impede the ability of prosecutors to negotiate guilty pleas to save costly trials and stave off further congestion of the courts. The letter says only that the $33.5 million, to be spread out over five years once the bill becomes law, is for "provision of prosecution-re- lated advice and litigation support dur- ing police investigations, and prosecution of drug charges under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act resulting from mandatory minimum penalties." No one other than Saunders and his management team, Nicholson, or the federal cabinet will know whether the PPSC obtained all of the new budget room it needed. As