I would suggest it's exactly as Mr. Elder referred to. It's a matter of trusting. You're going to have to trust. If you're going to enter into these bilateral or multilateral information-sharing arrangements, you're going to have to trust.
We can also put in place general limitations on what kind of information we share. What is the nature of the information we share? Also—and this is one of the things that might sound a little bit repetitive—what's the magnitude of the information we share? If the RCMP receives a query from the Department of Homeland Security regarding an individual that they have under investigation, that's a very different thing than giving the FBI full access to the Canadian Police Information Centre, which is currently the case. They're allowed almost unsupervised access to a massive trove of data. We don't have a whole lot of insight, accountability, or oversight, or even an understanding of what is happening with that information.
If it's on a case-by-case basis so that it's much more limited or it's much more controlled, then you have a much better sense of why they're asking. What's the nature of the information? Is it particularly sensitive? Is it something that's stigmatizing? Does it relate to, for example, religion or protected expression under our charter or all these other sorts of things? Shared databases and massive troves of information seem to be the trend these days. Instead of using knowledgeable investigative insight and individuals with the proper skills, they're throwing in technology, collecting a lot of information to create a haystack as big as they can, and then using technology to go through it looking for needles.
The problem is that the haystack is information about individuals who are 99.999% innocent. Technological scanning, for example, will produce false positives, will result in individuals wrongly ending up on no-fly lists and other things, or worse, ending up being tortured in a basement somewhere. That's what we need to protect. You don't share sensitive information that could cause harm to our citizens with somebody that you don't absolutely trust in terms of what's going to happen with that information.
Unfortunately, as Mr. Elder said, no Canadian law can tie the hands of any foreign government once they have that information. It needs to be a two-way street. It needs to be a relationship built on trust, but trust that's verified. Keep an eye on their track record. Has the information gone elsewhere? Be prepared to kind of pull back on the leash if there's any sign of trouble.