I will answer the honourable member.
You raise an interesting concern, the question being at what point do charter interests become involved, and the courts have wrestled with this. I believe this committee is in possession of an academic paper written by Mr. Russomanno as well as Professor MacDonnell, who I understand will be testifying later on to deal specifically with this issue.
Courts have come to conflicting decisions on this point as to whether security guards or private citizens enforcing the law involving a citizen's arrest create obligations that conform with charter norms. We can say at this point that it's split. If we had to see where the courts were going, it's likely that the Supreme Court of Canada on its previous jurisprudence would rule today that a private citizen did not incur charter obligations when arrested. It's a normative question as to whether they should or not, and it becomes even more complex when dealing with private security firms. There's a real distinction between what we expect from the Mr. Chens of the world or any single citizen who may come across this issue, find a crime in progress and arrest someone, versus what are our expectations of large-scale quasi-police in terms of large security firms. That is certainly a concern the Criminal Lawyers' Association views as something that is an issue.