Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being here today.
It's interesting. I'm retired from the RCMP and I've always struggled with this book, because it's the book we have to follow, whether we like it or not. The problem is that the evolution of crime over, certainly, the last 10 years has gone lightning speed compared to the evolution of this book, which hasn't changed, really, since about 1986.
I hear everyone here, and I want to ask one specific question at the end, but I wanted to give some context as to why I believe the bill has to involve the changing of the privacy laws as well. Right now, as it sits in the Criminal Code, we don't identify anything by “computer data”—absolutely nothing. It's not there. It says electronic data, it says a lot of things, but it doesn't say “computer data”. So the police look at it and go, “I don't know if I can do that, and I don't want to create bad case law by something that may or may not be interpreted by a judge as something I could or couldn't do”. This clearly defines it, and provides clear definition for the police as to what they can or cannot do.
One of the things they will be able to do if and when this law is passed is to create the clear understanding with regard to the preservation of data prior to a warrant, because right now, there's nothing. It's carte blanche. That's why it's difficult sometimes for the police to do things on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, because they're trying to figure out if they can do it legally. Morally, they can do it; of course they can. But they have to get it past a judge.
That's one of the first things I wanted to say, because I think this provides a great opportunity to get it right and move forward.
There are things in this bill that should be better, in my opinion. Having used a lot of the Criminal Code, especially with regard to wiretaps, I can tell you, as an author to an authorization for a wiretap, for anyone in this room who thinks it's “wham, bam, done!”, it don't happen that way. It takes months, if not years of investigation to eliminate every other possible way of doing the investigation before you go to the ultimate, which is a wiretap, because that's the ultimate invasion of someone's privacy. The police take it very seriously, because ultimately, they don't want to screw the investigation up. This provides them with the opportunity to preserve data that isn't there right now.
There are a couple of things that I think need to be better recognized in this bill, which I'll bring forward. People don't even recognize that upon completion of receiving computer data, you must within 60 days notify every person who has been intercepted, along with the entire other part of the investigation that you're moving forward, because the courts have said you have to have the accused in front of the courts within a certain time; you must disclose all of the data within a certain time. You have to do a whole bunch of things, and you also have to notify everyone within 60 days—just about impossible.
So we're going to try to get it right.
The one question I have, Mr. Chair, to each of the witnesses is how do we better educate police officers at the beginning of their training? Because that seems to be where we haven't caught up. The police just say, well, this is what I got. We need to educate them and say, listen, there are other things that you can do to make sure that the Alycha Redas, the Amanda Todds, and the Rehtaeh Parsons of the world know that we have compassion, because we do. We don't want anything to happen to anyone. That's the last thing we want, but we need to educate better.
What do you say to that?