Yes, this should most definitely be standardized using standardized racial descriptors. The Province of Ontario recently, as part of the Anti-Racism Act, put forth data [Technical difficulty—Editor] standards, which I think provide a good model. What would need to happen is simply a box on the UCR, the uniform crime reports, for example, that would capture race, so the racial categories that would be utilized—there are about a dozen in Ontario—would make their way onto the forms and into the databases that police use and collect.
I should note that although this is not done in a systematic fashion at the moment, we know from all the attention to police carding that the police have been collecting racial information across this country on the people they come into contact with. What we don't have is that being done in any kind of uniform fashion, and what we don't have is that being done throughout the different types of work the police do, and it's not reported to Statistics Canada.
From my perspective, that would take a bit of computer programming to ensure that the databases were proper, as well as the changing of fields in those databases and the forms used. It's a relatively simple thing to do. I say “relatively” purposely.