Perhaps I can say this as a starting point. I recognize the concerns with respect to protecting ongoing police investigations and the identity of confidential informants. These aren't novel concerns raised by the justification provisions under the Criminal Code. These are concerns that are dealt with day in and day out in our criminal courts in relation to the obtaining of search warrants, the sealing of “informations” to obtain search warrants, the editing by the Crown with judicial oversight of those “informations” to protect ongoing investigations and to protect the identity of informers.
What does come out of reviews of “informations” to obtain search warrants, even relatively early in the stage of an ongoing criminal investigation, is much more information that becomes available to the public than is at all contained in these reports. Simply identifying that offences of a particular type under a particular statute were committed without any factual context provides, in my view, a completely inadequate basis for evaluating the justification for resort to those provisions. So while the reporting provisions have instruction in a way to protect certain information, what's left is really an entirely unhelpful report.