The only guarantees I could provide you with are those provided by the DNA Identification Act, which makes it a criminal offence for the commissioner or the commissioner's delegates to use DNA information that the agency has in the National DNA Data Bank for any other purpose than what's permitted by the DNA Identification Act. There are restrictions on the use, and there are restrictions on what can be communicated, and there are further restrictions domestically on further communication by those who receive that information from the RCMP.
So the current DNA Identification Act and the amendments in Bill C-13 are, in my view, very restrictive. The DNA information that the RCMP has can only be communicated as authorized by the DNA Identification Act, section 6, and any other communication is an offence. Similarly, any other research that could be done with the DNA profiles, except to derive a forensic DNA profile, for the purposes of DNA data banking would be an offence.
Those are fairly serious prohibitions, and that in itself should be sufficient, in my view, to satisfy Canadians' concerns that there may be unauthorized or illegal uses of DNA profiles in the National DNA Data Bank. We probably have the most robust genetic privacy regime in any DNA data bank where the people who are using the DNA do not know the personal identification of the person who has submitted it. So the data bank operates anonymously with respect to the personal information. All it has is genetic information, and it has a very restricted legal regime that allows it to communicate only for the purposes that the DNA identification allow it to, and that's to essentially compare the convicted offender index with the crime scene index and report a match, and the moderate matching provisions that allow it to ensure the question, do we have a match? That's the expansion of the regime.
Otherwise, that is essentially all the DNA data bank officials can do with the DNA they have in the National DNA Data Bank. They ask, do we have a match? And then if it does, it goes to another portion that doesn't have the genetic information. All they have is personal.