Thank you for the opportunity to answer your question.
We've actually consulted many active-duty law enforcement officers from multiple agencies across Canada, and the general consensus is that we would like to reduce these occurrences in the first place. The consensus is also that when this difficult situation does arise, the determining factor generally is not whether or not a person had an object that may or may not have looked like a firearm; the general consensus is that the determining factor is the body language and the mannerisms displayed by the person in the situation.
There also have been many cases in which objects that were clearly not firearms have been mistaken for firearms. An example of that would be from Sean Arbuthnot, who is the founding director of ASIC, our organization. He was actually taken down at gunpoint in a city over a camera tripod that looked nothing like a firearm.