I'll go back to Bill C-12 and to where the conversation has perhaps deviated. What it specifies in proposed section 41.1 is that the Coast Guard “may collect, analyze and disclose information or intelligence.” We're talking about law enforcement. I don't see this as being within the span of Bill C-12.
In answering your second question first, the gap right now is information sharing. We have silos between departments and agencies and in levels of government, and we have an inability to ingest information provided by community subject matter experts. The Coast Guard is already present in our Arctic waters and in our Arctic skies. It is already seeing things that could be fed into a more robust intelligence picture.
What I see Bill C-12 doing with the amendments to the Oceans Act is actually allowing for harmonization and better consolidation of existing efforts. When I look at this, it's about understanding patterns of vessels of interest.
We often get caught up in sovereignty issues with big commercial vessels that may be passing through and exercising an impermissible right of transit passage, according to Canada's laws. I think there are a lot of smaller vessels that we have an ability to detect using different systems, but we don't have the ability to pull that all together, so it's about respecting the existing mandates of CBSA and the RCMP in terms of enforcement. Of course, CBSA is limited to ports of entry, and the RCMP has the prerogative to do investigations and apprehensions in our internal and territorial waters. It's being very precise here that the Coast Guard is just another component of this.
What Bill C-12 does very well is to provide that ability for them to share information in a more timely way, at the speed of relevance, to allow for that more robust common operating picture. To me, that's a critical enabler to everything that flows from it.