Justice committee  — the best possible debate on this.

Justice committee  I'm not proposing any particular period of time.

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  Oh, I'm not suggesting that it is. But it still has to meet a standard for the demand, which is proposed to be reasonable suspicion, and we agree that standard is a—

Justice committee  Yes, for preservation.

Justice committee  If you're speaking of evidence that remains in private hands, which is what we have here—

Justice committee  We're not taking a position on whether a private individual makes the choice of retaining or deleting data. What we take positions on is the authority of law enforcement to control that data in a sense of requiring that it be preserved. The standard of reasonable suspicion appear

Justice committee  I'm not sure that I understand your question.

Justice committee  Yes. It addresses seizure but also retention of personal information. That falls under the privacy acts of all the provinces, as well as the federal Privacy Act. All police agencies are public bodies that are subject to those privacy acts. So we don't see that it could be anythin

Justice committee  I think that someone who has worked in law enforcement directly could answer that question better. But my understanding is that retention periods for law enforcement files are very long, up to 99 years. The purpose of this provision is so that there is a justification of this wa

Justice committee  I have.

Justice committee  I'm not prepared to comment on the parliamentary process. My concern however was that there be—

Justice committee  I think what's been missing from the process, and there may not be a remedy in the parliamentary process, is public understanding of what this bill is about. We all know how polarized the debate is. It's very unfortunate that important witnesses such as Carol Todd come to this ve

Justice committee  So that was our concern.

Justice committee  I heard it and I reviewed her transcript. I don't think she was substantially inconsistent. But as I said, I'm not taking any position on the process. We only want there to be—