I assure you that those are the kinds of issues that we have dealt with.
The question of the person who doesn't want to be identified is one that is an operational issue, if I can put it that way. We always think of this in terms of Judy Peterson's missing child, a young child, and obviously the parents have a major interest. One of the problems is that an awful lot of missing persons reports are of a different nature entirely. Probably the biggest example is Project KARE, which you have heard of, where they gather the DNA from the sex trade workers. They actually wouldn't fit into Bill C-279. The police are not a relative so they have no right to upload it, and that's one of the issues, if it's to be a useful tool for the police, that we have to deal with.
My understanding is that in other jurisdictions that have these the police protocols have.... You find a person three years later who's disappeared at age 16 and you ask, why did you leave? There may be allegations of abuse. There can be all kinds of things that go in a completely different direction. The normal thing is that an adult is not going to be forcefully, if I can put it that way, identified to the person who reported them.
Those are difficult issues that would require police protocols. The operational side was dealing with that more than the legal side. We were aware of that issue.
The one that's probably bothered us the most is the privacy and charter implications surrounding the person. It's been uploaded in a normal way and sometime later it's a case of--I don't know if we can call it this--good news, bad news. We have good news: your child is alive. We have bad news: we think your child is involved as a killer out in Kingston, or something like that. That would be difficult.
The view of--I'll say this--the federal Department of Justice, because some of the provinces are not quite as convinced as we are, is that if the police have obtained information in an appropriate manner, and they would have done this in accordance with the legislation that's provided to them, and if this leads them to something else that they're entitled to follow--if I can use an analogy, the parents show up with a picture of the child, and for whatever reason it's recognized as the picture taken off a closed-circuit camera while a robbery was under way--the police would have, we believe, the right to follow that up. But it's very important that you inform the person who's uploading it and that this be the right person who has some genuine interest in it, that there is this possibility, that it could happen, and you ask, “Do you want us to check the crime scene index or not?” If they say no, you could cut it out.
Ron knows the way these things are operated in other jurisdictions because he deals with them all the time. But I understand that this kind of “fill out the form with which one you want checked” is what's used in other countries.