Certainly I agree that it's two different models. We also have, for example, a human rights commission and a human rights tribunal, a competition commissioner and a competition tribunal. There are other scenarios in Canada in which that particular model is applicable. There is the possibility for conflicts, and one would have to have controls and procedural safeguards within the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada to make sure that those conflicts did not arise.
Given the stakes that this legislation presents, with multi-million-dollar penalties, even multi-billion-dollar penalties when you look at percentage of a company's global turnover, it raises the requirement for additional procedural safeguards. You can think of it as a scenario in which a police officer can write a ticket, and you could pay the ticket and plead guilty and go on your way, or you can dispute it, and the police officer has the burden of proving in front of an impartial decision-maker whether or not the facts alleged in that ticket are borne out. That would be the model that I would advocate.
Otherwise, maybe we can split the difference, and when it comes to anything that has a significant penalty over a certain threshold, it would require those additional safeguards. Those are going to be important.
I would also note that we're seeing more and more multi-jurisdictional investigations taking place simultaneously, so organizations are going to be subject to multiple penalties in multiple places arising from the exact same investigation. The fine threshold in Quebec is similar to the fine threshold here. You could find those to be doubly levelled, which again, at least to me, raises the stakes higher.