There are a couple of aspects to my answer.
First of all, in our situation, we have a memorandum of understanding to deal with the agencies we work with. I was once asked how that works, and I said it's actually harder but the results are better. It's complicated to bring people from different philosophical perspectives together to work on the same problem with competing policies, and sometimes even competing goals or mandates, who are all supposedly working toward the same goal.
But the big thorn in my side is health care, quite honestly. I think we heard this from a couple of the other people here. I can give you an example of a case involving a death that was potentially criminal. A lady was admitted to hospital with obvious signs of neglect, yet 24 hours passed before a report was made to police. We took a major case management approach to that investigation, but by the time we got there, critical evidence had already been lost about the victim's condition, because she'd been bathed and cleaned. We set about trying to get statements and information from the 20-odd staff members who had dealt with this lady. I went right from the top-down, that is through their legal department, and found out that hospital legal folks didn't know the law.
When I finally got the go-ahead to get statements from those people, we prepared a questionnaire to distribute to them. Of the 20-odd people who got the questionnaire, I'll give you a guess how many I got back to me: none.
That's the response—and that's not the exception, but the rule within health care. They don't want to become involved in any kind of criminal investigation. People shake their heads hearing that, and it doesn't made sense, but I'm telling you that it is the case. It is a battle over and over and over again with health care. Alberta, for example, has a health information act—and I'm sure every province has its own, too—that outlines stiff penalties for violating the provisions.
I'll tell you right now that this isn't about needing new legislation, but about professionals understanding their own legislation, which they don't. There are provisions within the current legislation for them to share and to disclose almost any form of criminal abuse. But they don't; they choose not to.