What I would like to say is that there was never any written policy about it. The practice was that we would never go systematically into schools.
There were exceptional cases. We would normally go when a parent or a guardian asked us, in cases where they had been detained and asked us to stop by the school to pick up the children. The other was when we had used up all the possible options for trying to identify where the family were staying—the parents, the adults, because our concern is always the adults. Sometimes in exceptional cases we would go into the school to try to find an address for the parents.
The two cases in Toronto each fell into that category. In one of the cases we picked up the mother, and the mother asked that we stop by to pick up her children. In the other case we had been looking for the family and had not been able to find them. Then we found out that the kids might be at a school, so the officers went into the school.
That is what that statement means. We reviewed the issue and have sent out clear written instructions about the situation. Basically the written instructions are clear: officers are to avoid as much as possible ever going to schools at all. However, there are two situations where they may go to schools: one, if a parent or guardian asks that they go to the school to pick up the children. Again, we try to minimize. We wouldn't go into the classroom; we would go to the principal's office. The other issue would be if there were a national security or serious criminality case and an officer in a region felt there was a reason we had to do this. They need to come to headquarters to seek concurrence and permission to do that.
I appeared a couple of days ago before the Senate committee on human rights and indicated that we believed we would use that option very rarely but felt that as a matter of policy we had to leave it as an option to be considered. It would come either to me or the DG of enforcement to be looked at. At this moment in time I can't really think of a reason for us to use it, but we felt that policy-wise we had to have that option.