As I indicated earlier in my statement, we enforce not only the provisions of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, which is provincial legislation or referred to as a general application act, and then the Criminal Code, which is a federal statute.
For us, oftentimes we will look at both. Certainly the advantage to going with a Criminal Code offence is that those offences provide for criminal sentencing and criminal records; whereas, laws of general application that are enforced by provincial legislation are essentially laws of summary conviction and make it much more difficult for us to be able to share that information with our counterparts.
There has been an initiative by Humane Canada with respect to NCPAC and the development of a database on case law that has been particularly helpful. However, in most cases, we would prefer to be able to go criminal. Certainly, in cases that are of lesser significance or importance—and not that any of them are—the Crown does have the ability to lessen that offence to a provincial statute if necessary.