Sure. Realistically, that mostly doesn't go specifically to section 176, and this varies from province to province.
In seven provinces and, I believe, all three territories, the charging decision isn't made by a crown prosecutor at all; it's made by a police officer. A police officer decides which charge to lay. Indeed, one of the things the Supreme Court of Canada has frequently said is that we don't want criminal law to be within the discretion of the police as to whether something is against the law or not. When you leave wide discretion, you create disparity in how the law is enforced, which is why we want the laws to be as clear as possible. It's only in three out of 10 provinces that it's actually the crown prosecutor who would be deciding.
If I remember the Statistics Canada figures correctly on this, about 70% of all charges that are laid are really for just 10 related offences, such as assault or assault causing bodily harm. There are 10 families of them that account for 70% of it. It's rare that a police officer is trying to decide, “Gee, what charge am I going to lay here?” Most of the time they already know. It's one of the familiar ones.
When they have to look around—that's the rare case—they actually just flip through the code, trying to work out what it is. One of the provisions that's being removed in this bill is pretending to practise witchcraft. It probably hadn't been prosecuted for 30 or 40 years, and about six months ago, some police officer in Toronto laid that charge. At some level, there's an element of randomness as to when the lesser-known offences come up. It's somebody looking at the index, doing a search online, and trying to find it. It's possible that the crown can then look at it and say, “You know what? That's the wrong one.”
Our theory is that crown prosecutors ought to be doing that after police have made the initial decisions. Mostly it does happen, but it depends on crown to crown.