Yes, very much so.
I have to indicate as well that we've had, and certainly I've had in the last couple of years, excellent cooperation from the RCMP to actually try to make the legislation work, to optimize it. I'll give you a simple example.
We have an independent observer program and it isn't found in legislation. If, say, there's a shooting that results in serious injury or death--certainly perhaps in British Columbia, where there are 7,000 RCMP present--we'll go out and do monitoring of the investigation and make sure that the officers are independent. That's not in the book, but with the reality that there's so much public concern about the impartiality of police investigating the police, we try to do that.
My work on the taser actually flowed from a request from the minister. It's not in the legislation, but he obviously.... I was contacted and asked if I could do that. I said sure we could, as long as the RCMP agreed to cooperate. But there is no legislative compulsion. That's another one that was done off the book, if you can call it that.
What we have are certain key problems, and I can show you how problematic they are. If I'm doing an investigation flowing from an organized crime investigation, most of that might be with wiretaps and things of that nature. A national security one would be the same thing. The Criminal Code, part VI, has a statutory prohibition that criminalizes disclosure outside of the confines specified in the legislation. The police cannot give me that information without doing a criminal offence. So even where they want to cooperate, they cannot cooperate, by law.
I have authority to look at the witness protection program--it's written right in my act that I have responsibility in this area--but there's a prohibition in there about the police disclosing information that would disclose the identity of someone in the witness protection program. But the whole thing is to create a new identity for them. We have this bizarre situation where, even with the best of intentions, we cannot get over legislative hurdles that have been put in place and that are obstructing our ability to do our work.
As indicated, it goes back to, I believe, the very first report made by the chair of my commission. There were 33 recommendations indicated at that time. There were things that were clearly defective.
My concern as well is that cooperation is episodic. You have two personalities, the commissioner and me, who want to cooperate. You could have one of those personalities change and the cooperation disappear. So even with those personalities, we have problems. And if you don't have those personalities, there are many objections you can raise. In section 38 of the Canada Evidence Act, you can cover all sorts of national security work such that we couldn't get in to look at it at all. The door would effectively be barred.
So there are problems, and I think it's accruing to the.... It's unfortunate, and to the detriment of the RCMP in this current environment, that we are not able to more effectively work to assess these problems.