Public Safety committee  What I wanted to comment on was that Justice Iacobucci specifically raises the issue that you referred to. In fact, one of his findings is to suggest that in fact it's a practice to send information to another country labelling someone as an Islamic terrorist, or something else,

Public Safety committee  Yes, we will do that.

Public Safety committee  I continue to think there might be value. One thing is, at least according to some reports, that there's plea bargaining. There is failure of the prosecutors to make the request. I think it's very useful to separate what a third party might view as a reasonable use of judicial di

Public Safety committee  I'll be brief. We're not convinced that this would necessarily be more effective, unless we have some reason to believe that there's a problem now that the information is being misused. From our perspective, the privacy intrusion is not about the misuse of the information in the

Public Safety committee  There are already provisions under the Conditional Release Act that allow, on a case-by-case basis, information to be released to local police forces and to the community, when someone is released who is considered to be a threat. We would much prefer this to be dealt with on a c

Public Safety committee  I have a couple of comments. First of all, on the issue of discretion and the percentage of offenders who are in the national registry, one of the things I would suggest is that you try to get a very clear sense of why you're not capturing a higher percentage. Would a reasonabl

Public Safety committee  That's a fair point. But with respect to, I guess, the heart of your question--whether too much focus is being placed on the privacy rights of the offenders, and therefore, by definition, you've built in failure--I'd go back to the point I made earlier. It seems to me that a huge

Public Safety committee  My understanding is that the most significant difference between the federal system and the Ontario system is the issue of discretion. We've discussed the issue of discretion, and perhaps my colleague can comment on the issue of discretion.

Public Safety committee  Well, let me make a couple of comments. First, as I think I suggested, we didn't come here today to advocate the abolition of the scheme, so we're not saying that you should do away with this. One of the other concerns of our office, quite frankly, is with the amount of inform

Public Safety committee  I guess the question is, how much more information? You have all of the physical characteristics of the individual. He or she's required to provide an address, keep it up to date. The possibility of adding information about the vehicle, we've discussed that. I guess it would be a

Public Safety committee  With the very important caveat of the overriding question of the effectiveness of the scheme, adding vehicle information is a relatively minor additional piece of information to what's already being captured. Keep in mind that, since people do change their vehicles frequently, it

Public Safety committee  Clearly, we don't have any expertise with respect to law enforcement, but unfortunately on Tuesday I believe Sergeant Nezan commented that the national sex offender registry had not been used to solve a single crime. If there are ways from a systems perspective to make it easier

Public Safety committee  There are several possibilities. One potential possibility would be the Auditor General. I know the Ontario Auditor General reported on the Ontario registry in 2007. The Ontario Auditor General came to the conclusion there was no clear evidence the Ontario registry was effective

Public Safety committee  I think we'd have to see what additional information that's proposed would be collected. There is a significant amount of information that is collected now. I understand that there is some debate about the fact that the taking of photographs isn't mandatory. But I think it really

Public Safety committee  We recognize that people convicted of offences have a reduced expectation of privacy. As it turned out yesterday, we appeared before the Senate to discuss the review of the DNA Identification Act. That's an example of another piece of legislation that's based on the assumption th