For those specific provisions, currently under PIPEDA there's a regime called the investigative body regime. It lists a number of entities that are allowed to do these activities now. The range of entities that are there are, for example, the bank crime prevention organization that works for the bank association. They share information back and forth among banks around people who have been robbing ATMs. They have videos at ATMs. They use and share that information without the thieves' consent so they can identify and do an investigation into the crimes. I've visited them. They share information across the country from different banks on people who are stealing from ATMs or robbing right inside the location. It's that kind of sharing we're talking about in that context.
Under the current investigative body regime there are those kinds of sector organizations. Then there are professional associations, such as professional engineers associations, colleges of physicians and surgeons, and the Law Society of Upper Canada, that do investigations into their own members in assuring that their own members are following the code of conduct for their organizations.
You have a third grouping such as forensic auditors who do that kind of activity on behalf of somebody else.
They share information without consent in the course of investigations. These investigations are generally for other public policy purposes in protecting Canadians from crimes, as in the bank example. That kind of information gets flowed back and forth.
What Parliament recommended in the first review of the act was to take an approach of regulating the activity rather than regulating the specific entities, which is the approach that B.C. and Alberta have taken. Rather than having the prescribed list of organizations that has to be updated—if you change your name, you have to go through regulation to have your name changed in the regulation—they said regulate the type of activities rather than regulate the individual entities and put them all on a list in the back.
That's what S-4 has done. It's taken that investigative bodies regime and split it into these two other sections to go and regulate the type of activity rather than the bodies themselves. That's what Parliament recommended and that's what B.C. and Alberta do now.