Thank you.
Let me first say that it's great to have some informed public policy feedback from a Canadian-based foundation, such as this one, founded in memory of the late prime minister, former Prime Minister Trudeau.
This particular area of law was enacted because we are a rule-of-law jurisdiction, and the court found that police officers didn't have the right to break the law when they were enforcing the law. I suppose we can all recognize that for centuries police have had to indirectly break the law in order to enforce the law, such as when they speed or go through a stop sign or use an assault to detain someone in an arrest, and we've accepted that. In many other rule-of-law jurisdictions around the world, that's ongoing. I don't believe they've tried to codify this particular area of law.
Mr. Thompson made this point. How much codification are we going to have to do here before we codify ourselves into a library and we forget about law enforcement itself?
One of your suggestions is that these sections apply just to organized crime. Can I suggest to you that it's really difficult to define what organized crime is? I mean, in theory, it's a minimum of two people working together to break the law for the purpose of profit. But given the difficulty of defining organized crime, as you think we might like to consider here, isn't there enough constraint in the use of these sections, buried in the section I'm going to cite here? You'll recognize it; it's 25.1(8)(c). In other words, it says that the means used by police, under these sections, have to be proportional to the nature of the offence or the criminal activity being investigated.
That section is intended to impose constraints on police in the use of these sections. So do you feel that it's too weak? Should this stuff come before a judge for scrutiny at some point in some case, don't you think these sections provide enough constraint?