The national records management system is intended for all investigations and all the evidence that is collected as part of those investigations. CPIC just has a very small.... It's simply to reference certain types of offences with regard to offenders.
This idea here is that police forces currently collect, even on these complex, multi-jurisdictional investigations, their own pieces of evidence. They don't have an electronic system to collate this, so they literally exchange—in most cases, not all of the cases—paperwork.
The PRIME and the PROS servers that the RCMP have don't have enough capacity, for instance, to upload large files with regard to pictures, JPEGs, records, and whatnot. So we don't have an effective way, in these increasingly complex investigations, of actually keeping track of all the material that is being collected. When we end up sharing that material, it stays within that one particular police force that is running the investigation or in a sharing mechanism that a couple of the organizations might have worked out for that particular investigation.
We don't have an opportunity for multi-jurisdictional investigations where every police force can enter its records—evidence as it gathers it, its pictures, whatever seizures it might have—into the same records management system that is then accessible to all the police forces working on that particular file, and is also immediately electronically accessible to the crown, to the Public Prosecution Service of Canada. It also makes it possible to release all those records to the courts, and possibly also to the defence, because this way we won't have issues with regard to disclosure, for instance, when we find something at the bottom of some box that we perhaps forgot and that then compromises the investigation. We have one electronic mechanism of keeping records.
While this might not be as important when we're trying to prosecute burglaries at the local level, when we're trying to have national security investigations, when we're trying to prosecute organized crime across multiple provinces, across municipal, provincial, federal police forces, we need a mechanism to keep all that evidence electronically in one place rather than having disparate pieces and then trying to share paper among all these organizations—let alone trying to bring that paper into a courtroom to disclose it.