I will not claim that I have worked it out in terms of our own constitution or anything, but the general principle is that one could be able to delay part of the information in disclosure. I don't mean until after the trial, but later on in the process--for instance, about the identity of the witness. You may say “I'm disclosing that I have a witness who will be prepared to say the following”, but the actual identity of the witness will not be disclosed until later.
Countries have explored that. Of course, in Europe many countries have had a lot of success, even in front of their courts of human rights, with various forms of partial anonymity for witnesses. That's very difficult in our system, but I don't think we have fully explored all of the possibilities there. That's beyond my own competence to come up with wording that would satisfy the Supreme Court, but I think there are possibilities there that can be explored.
Of course it's always a matter of finding a balance between the rights of the accused, but I think there are methods there that we have not fully explored, because again, it's fairly recently that we have fully understood the importance of getting the collaboration of people out there who are being intimidated and who are at risk. It has always been a problem. It's been in the last 10 or 15 years that basically the criminal law community has begun to understand that if you're dealing with very powerful conspiracies, whether it's terrorist groups or organized crime or economic crime groups, basically you have to find ways to fight them, and that is with information. These groups are close. They punish those within the group who cooperate or give information to authorities. They go to great lengths to hide themselves, to protect themselves against detection, and so on. So it calls for different methods. Of course, the methods are complicated, as you pointed out. But I don't think we've done all of our homework in terms of looking at what is possible in terms of procedural law that would stand, basically, the various tests of our charter and the constitution, that would allow us do a better job.