In the context of the Criminal Code, there are considerable, very detailed criteria for the different types of circumstances in which law enforcement might be engaged with that. There are many decades of precedent about how the charter is applied in those circumstances. Today, yes, it's relatively straightforward, but it's based on decades of hashing out the details and lots of detailed practice. It's an activity that the court is designed for.
What we are talking about here involves, generally, determinations of fact and not law. What that means is this: What is the nature of the threat? How much equipment is it implicating? How easy is it to remedy that issue?
This is fundamentally a policy or a regulatory process. There are no criteria to instruct the court on how to consider this matter. It is completely unique. There is no precedent for it that I can think of—not just in Canada, but in any country—to guide the court in terms of how to apply it. It involves fundamental questions of fact, which means the court would need to be briefed, get up to speed and understand the technical details, which they certainly can do, but it's why, typically, these judicial processes take six to 18 months.
The other thing I will say is that I know there's been a focus on exigency, but to some degree, I'm almost as concerned about all of the routine activities we need to do when we think about how we regulate the telecom sector as it is. When the service providers end up in court, which happens from time to time—again, it's very rare in the grand scheme of the total number of regulatory actions we take; we have around 150,000 licences out in the field on just the spectrum part alone—we are talking about a year or a year and a half.