I would say that it is as specific as you're going to get. Our situation is that the inevitable does happen. People do flee. The individual trying to make the arrest does lose sight, and arguably under the current version you've now lost that arrest power.
It's trying to address what is going on in reality, the fact that people need to have the ability to arrest somebody who has committed a crime--in a timely fashion.
When we go to the proposed amendments to the act, we're talking about a situation where they have to find them a reasonable time after. Again, “reasonable” is used throughout all of our laws. I think we have to look at it and say that if we have that in every other area of our Criminal Code, we have to assume that people, and most importantly the police, will understand what that means. So when it comes time to apply that situation, the facts dictate in all cases what is reasonable.
The idea here, though, is that it's meant to be relatively contemporaneous with the event. That's our view of it. That's how it would be instructed to our members, that it has to be somewhat contemporaneous with it. Days after the event I suspect would not be the situation. We can't pull out a stopwatch and say “If you get him within the first hour, that's good. Anything beyond that is not reasonable.” I don't believe that the law has ever tried to put any aspect of use of force or of lawful authority into a box like that.
Is there room for debate? There will always be room for debate whenever you bring in the concept of reasonableness. I would submit that we are comfortable with this, and that we will let the facts dictate and guide us. Really, this is the reality of what's currently going on, and as it has been pointed out, I think we need the protections for those individuals who are going to act. Whether we want them to or not, they're going to. Let's recognize that and give them reasonable powers. I would say that what we have here is a balance of what is reasonable, so we're comfortable.