That's a tough question.
Just for the committee's information, the test under Stinchcombe is that everything is to be disclosed that is clearly not irrelevant. I think one of the committee members brought up the fact that we can't get into the mind of a defence counsel. It's really difficult even for us to ascertain what is relevant and irrelevant. Something that appears to be totally innocuous may be really important to the defence. We don't know,so we always err on the side of inclusion, and of course the test is “clearly irrelevant”, that is, what is really clearly irrelevant in a case. That's a very difficult thing.
What can we do? I don't think it's for me to say here what we can do, but here's what I can say, for what it's worth. I've wondered about this. I've wondered about how investigations were conducted. I realize that Stinchcombe wasn't around 20 or 25 years ago; it was in the early nineties that Stinchcombe came in. But we have all these new tools now. We have the ability to put vast amounts of information through computers and to put various things into databases.
So when we do these investigations, we can continue them not just for a month or two months, but for a year or a year and a half. Also, we can employ police officers across provinces and we can get all of their information and import all of it into a database. That may actually mean going far up the chain to get the people we want, but by the same token, I wonder if in creating the ability to do that we haven't outsmarted ourselves and produced a product that we simply can't prosecute.
Because you have to remember that when we go into court, we have to present the evidence through witnesses. We don't have the ability to simply put a hard drive in the court or on the jury's desks and say, “Here you go--read it”. We need to do it through witnesses. I wonder if we haven't created a kind of monster through the use of computers and the like.