Thank you, Chair.
By way of introduction, I can tell you that the government does not support either one of these proposed amendments. We did take action to move to an automatic inclusion model in order to address concerns that some convicted sex offenders were not being included on the national sex offender registry, and that's certainly the case with both of these amendments. When my colleagues talk about discretion, let me tell you, there's a great deal of discretion all the way through the process, beginning with the police officer who first investigates, who does use a great deal of discretion in these matters. The prosecutors will also use discretion on moving forward with them. Certainly, it doesn't take away the entire discretion of the judiciary. They're ultimately the people who will decide on the guilt or innocence of the people, and they may very well have their own opinions about a variety of things.
To water down the registry by moving to the situation of 'may' or 'may not', I think, is counterproductive to what we heard people asking for. I would agree that it's longer than the Ontario registry. Don't forget, the Ontario registry has been in place for some time. Perhaps if Ontario were to revisit it, they may match ours. I don't know that, but I wouldn't say that we should simply mirror what Ontario has in everything. There are good parts of it, but I do believe this is the proper balance.
What we're talking about are convicted sex offenders. Make no mistake, sex offenders typically do not start at the top of the list of offences, they start at the bottom and typically build. So having lots of information in there, the police community can certainly weed out the wheat from the chaff when it comes time to investigate offences. I think it's so important that we put in these clauses the way they're drafted in order to give that information and those tools to the community at large, but certainly to the investigative authorities and also to the prosecutors.