I'm not sure there's anything unique. As Superintendent Brennan was saying, the technology changes so quickly that trying to intercept it is a huge issue for us. We're really just trying to keep pace still. If you take a smaller department like mine of fewer than 1,000 people, every time the technology changes and the criminals get into PIN messaging, Twitter, and text messaging, you find that although you've just put $500,000 or $600,000 into an intercept system, within months you have to upgrade it. For a municipal department, that's difficult to do when you're trying to keep ahead.
In one of our recent investigations, they were throwing phones away almost daily, and to replace them and get back up again is about $800. Every time these guys just throw a card or a phone away, or change their technology on a daily or weekly basis, you're always chasing. Then, of course, as the superintendent was saying, you're back into affidavit writing. These affidavits, as I'm sure you've heard, go into the thousands of pages in some cases.
What the Canadian chiefs have asked for is that when these companies create the latest technology to communicate with, they should also have to put a fix in place to help law enforcement continue to do their job. They need to be good corporate partners. These are the types of things we've been talking about over the last couple of years in the policing community: work with us, have industry work with us, so that we can have access to information that's ground down, the stuff that was in the two bills you talked about and getting those types of things passed to help us. It's not a case of making it overly easy for us to do our job, but of getting us back to a level playing field, so we can at least get in there and keep pace with some of these people whom we're dealing with.