Not really. These are very funny words. You're dealing with smoke when you deal with review and oversight.
One of the traditional things we have...you could call us an appeal body in terms of complaints. Although they talk of that as a review, it's actually an appeal function. And we both would have the same kind of review thing, which is absent any kind of complaint. The model would be that you could go and do an investigation of their files to see what's going on.
I'll give you a classic example of where that would play out. Currently, the RCMP has the power in certain instances, as all police do, to do something that a citizen cannot do because it is a breach of the law. The media call it breaking the law to enforce the law. Actually, it follows from a Supreme Court of Canada decision that authorized them to do it. That requires the RCMP to provide information and a report to the minister, and the minister tables it with Parliament to show you instances where they've used this power to engage in what would otherwise be unlawful activities in pursuit of an investigation.
There are a number of things that result in that document being edited down: it can damage ongoing investigations, human sources, and things like that. So it's fair to say that the report that Parliament gets is quite thin, a very thin gruel. You actually don't know what's going on. That would be one where I believe it would be appropriate for the review body to go in and look at what is going on, see how often it is being used, if it is being used proportionately and appropriately, that the people are properly trained, and then do a report that will not disclose any of the guts in it but will give you a third-party assurance that the powers are being appropriately used.
Absent an ability to do that right now, whenever this issue comes up there are allegations that the police and their agents are doing all sorts of horrific things. That's one where we can go in, with no complaint, but look at a program and come back and tell you, yes, it's working. In an audit function we make recommendations. Are those recommendations followed? We want to be able to go in and look at that. And this is the thing you have to be aware of: when people talk about oversight, what they mean is, as the officer is conducting his or her investigation, you're there looking at what they're doing. You'd be second-guessing, saying, well, I wouldn't get a search warrant there, or I wouldn't get a wiretap, or I would.
That's oversight. But that doesn't mean you can't sit back and look at programs that are ongoing, because some police investigations go on for years. So that's the difference. You're not telling them how to do their job. You look at it after the fact, but you should be able to test the programs and so on that are in place.