If it was a normal situation, I would think most police officers would take the more direct route. But if you had a situation where a Canadian police officer or military person or some other Canadian official actually caused intentional and serious bodily harm and intentional pain or suffering, Canada would want that prosecution to be conducted under section 269.1 in compliance with our obligations. We would not want to prosecute some other offence also called torture, which might be considered a lesser crime. That would signal to our allies and other countries which maybe are not our allies which actually torture people that it's all right to have some lesser offence and call it torture. We're trying to hold people's feet to the fire and get them to abide by their international obligations, to implement the torture convention definition, to implement the offence, and to prosecute it. Don't prosecute something else so that you don't have to prosecute your officials and label them as torturers.
