Sure. The act currently authorizes businesses to use information they come across in the normal course of their business activities. So if a business organization saw something it thought was suspicious in nature, it could certainly use that and later on disclose that to the RCMP or to CSIS or whatever.
What the law has done now with the Public Safety Act amendment is it has expanded that to allow a business organization to collect information, and the word “collect” in my reference point means something you don't already have. So you can go forth and gather new information for the purpose of later disclosing it to the RCMP. I think the fact that the law has now permitted organizations and private businesses, on their own, without direction, without guidance, to start collecting new information about employees or their clients or any third party certainly creates a situation where they could easy violate charter rights in the sense of perhaps engaging in things that would be considered an unreasonable search. For example, a company could decide, on the basis of its own suspicions, to do a locker search of employees because they're concerned about some national security issue. I think the law should not permit private businesses to start collecting new information for this purpose on a suspicion basis. There's a pretty low bound in terms of the anti-terrorism type of investigation. It's not even probable cause. It's a suspicion of, and I think there is certainly a concern.
Secondly, if the RCMP came to a business and said, we'd like you to collect information for us, they're really making that business an agent of the state, and they may do so in circumstances where they would not themselves be able to get a warrant, but they're going to ask the business to collect information for them. I can't say for certain that this has ever occurred, but it's certainly a troublesome area of the law, and I certainly think you need to look at it and you need to recommend back to Parliament that these amendments need to be reconsidered, at the very least.