Bill S-2 (Historical)

Protecting Victims From Sex Offenders Act

An Act to amend the Criminal Code and other Acts

This enactment amends the Criminal Code, the Sex Offender Information Registration Act and the National Defence Act to enhance police investigation of crimes of a sexual nature and allow police services to use the national database proactively to prevent crimes of a sexual nature.
It also amends the Criminal Code and the International Transfer of Offenders Act to require sex offenders arriving in Canada to comply with the Sex Offender Information Registration Act.
It also amends the Criminal Code to provide that sex offenders who are subject to a mandatory requirement to comply with the Sex Offender Information Registration Act are also subject to a mandatory requirement to provide a sample for forensic DNA analysis.
It also amends the National Defence Act to reflect the amendments to the Criminal Code relating to the registration of sex offenders.

Protecting Victims From Sex Offenders Act

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to engage in debate on Bill S-2 at the third reading stage. This is actually the first time I have had a chance to look through the bill at any depth or precision.

I have to say at the outset that my party and I support the bill both in principle and in much of its detail. As happens so often here, there may be minor details in a bill that are not to the liking of everyone, but we tend to give our bills marks out of 100 and anything that gets more than 50% or 60% seems to fly. However, in this case I too have some remarks on the bill, out of sensitivity for the area that we are legislating in.

The principle and thesis are good. We in the Liberal Party believe that more robust state intervention in documenting those who have committed sexual offences in the past would lead to improved police enforcement and greater protection for the general public. It is not just for the protection of children but for the general public.

I can accept that because, with 20/20 hindsight, there have been many public incidents across the country where sexual offenders have moved around and continued to commit offences without detection or at least without being apprehended. Most think that if these people had been properly documented, it would have allowed police to access records that might have allowed them to connect the dots, keep closer tabs and prevent offences of this nature.

One of the most important principles is the one that says inclusion of an offender on the sex offender registry should be based on risk to the public. It should not be seen as punishment. Punishment of a convicted sex offender should be handled by the court and the sentence should be appropriate. I think we all agree on that. However, the sex offender registry is intended to identify risk.

The approach of the government, as other colleagues have pointed out, raises the possibility of over-inclusion, of unnecessarily putting too many individuals in the registry, which may affect the workability of the registry. It essentially has to do with the efficiency with which the registry will be used to protect the public. I will come back to that later in my remarks.

The bill generally focuses on four classes of persons. Most of them, of course, are not controversial. The first one is persons convicted of offences of a sexual nature. The bill goes a long distance toward broadening the scope of those offences, and so there are a lot of different types of persons and offences now being included.

A second category is those who are not found guilty of a criminal offence of this nature but found not criminally responsible by reason of a mental disorder. In that case, there is no conviction but there is an offence. I will come back to that later as well. The third category is under the National Defence Act, for armed forces members who are not governed by the Criminal Code directly but by the National Defence Act.

The last category is individuals who come back to Canada having been convicted of this type of offence internationally. In most cases, they will have applied and been transferred back to Canada under an existing arrangement. The offence, conviction and facts are known, and there is a need to include some of those individuals in Canada's sex offender registry.

As I mentioned, this is not just a registry that lists a name, address and telephone number. The registry actually includes DNA, and here we are getting pretty much definitive identification. People who are required by court order to be included in the registry, or now in this legislation, virtually automatically, have to provide appropriate DNA samples, and that is recorded.

The bottom line, just in the overview of this bill, is that it is intended to enhance public safety and the existing procedures both for the appropriate inclusion of individuals, although the procedures in the bill are virtually automatic and do not directly address the issue of risk, and for access to the registry by police or appropriate police officers in Canada.

In reading the bill, I have to say I was rather struck by clause 2 of the bill. I am hoping I will have a chance to ask a question of a government member here later. Clause 2, for reasons that have not been explained, does not have anything to do with the sex offender registry, and it actually changes subsection 173(2) of the Criminal Code.

I know some of us will be uncomfortable when I go into this, but currently, subsection 173(2) criminalizes the exposing of genitals to a person who is under the age of 14. That is what the section was. I do not think it was ever explained, and in fact I took a look at the summary of the bill and it does not even mention this. This bill now criminalizes that same act for persons under 16. At first blush, one might ask what the difference is between 14 and 16 for exposing genitals, and I have to say—

[The Deputy Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

This might be a good spot to interrupt the member's speech. The hon. member will have approximately 13 minutes to conclude his remarks, but it being 2 o'clock, we will move on to statements by members.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill S-2, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and other Acts, be read the third time and passed.

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

When the bill was last before the House, the hon. member for Scarborough--Rouge River had the floor. There are 13 minutes remaining in the time allotted for the hon. member's remarks. I therefore call upon the hon. member for Scarborough--Rouge River.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to resume debate on this bill. When my remarks were interrupted just prior to question period, I was dealing with clause 2 of the bill, which would create a new section.

As we had discussed earlier, throughout the debate, this bill is about the sex offender registry. It is not clear to me why clause 2 was inserted into the bill. As I was pointing out, the bill would rewrite a section of the Criminal Code that deals with the criminal act of exposing one's genitals to a person under 14 years of age; that is, subsection 173(2). I just did not quite understand the relevance of clause 2 in this particular bill that we are dealing with. We have rewritten the section, or at least part of it, to say it is an offence for a person in any place, for any sexual purpose, to do that to a person under the age of 16. It is just merely the exposure, not any other sexual act.

The way the section was written previously, it applied to individuals under 14 years of age.

This would include 14- and 15-year-olds. It just seems to me quite odd that in the year 2010 we would criminalize 14- or 15-year-olds for the simple act of exposing genitals.

I am only guessing, but a provision such as this had to have been written by someone who was a little bit older. I cannot imagine that a young person would regard this as a serious criminal act, yet that is what this section would do.

In the end, I am probably going to end up voting in favour of the larger bill, but I am flagging this particular issue because it would criminalize the conduct as between two 15-year-olds that I am not so sure all Canadians would think was criminal. However, somebody, in writing this bill, decided that it would be criminal. In the particular case of two 15-year-olds, they would be dealt with under the Youth Criminal Justice Act; they would be dealt with as young offenders.

My point is that this would criminalize something and would probably insert it into the bill that we are dealing with here. Let me just say that although it is a numbered section in the bill, it seems to me that it would make an amendment to the Criminal Code by stealth. The bill was written for an entirely different purpose, that of dealing with the sexual offender registry.

In any event, I have made the point and I regret that it was included. However, I am sure there are Canadians who would disagree with me.

The next thing I want to talk about is the category of mental disorder.

This particular bill would include, in those who are made part of the sex offender registry, those who are not criminally responsible because of a mental disorder. That is fine. There are two ways to look at this and both are valid.

One way of looking at this is that, because someone has a mental disorder, he or she absolutely should be recorded in the registry. There is some sense in that. If someone has a mental disorder that may predispose him or her to the commission of a crime of this nature, then it does make sense.

Another way of looking at it is that, should persons with a mental disorder for a short period of time in their life become implicated in the act, should they have this type of difficulty, the act would actually, in many cases, put them into the sex offender registry and they might up staying on it for their lifetime.

It is not clear to me that in every case someone who has a mental disorder at a certain point in his or her life, being subjected to the virtually automatic procedures under the bill, should be placed in the registry indefinitely. It could be said that there are provisions in the act to either terminate or exempt the registration, but for individuals who are not rich, who are poor or without means, in many cases they may just drift through life and stay on the registry when they do not pose a risk. I wanted to ensure the record was clear on that.

I want the record to show just how comprehensive the legislation is. I will not read every section of it, but only the sections of the code that require someone to be included in the registry automatically. There are offences in relation to children, sexual interference, invitation to sexual touching, sexual exploitation, compelling the commission of other sexual offences, a parent or guardian involved in this activity, child luring, stupefying or overpowering for the purpose, living off the avails of prostitution and obtaining prostitution of a person under the age of 18.

In relation to those latter sections, the person who is accused and convicted is a person who might not even be involved in a sexual offence. Therefore, one might ask this. What risk of committing a sexual offence do those people pose and why should they be on the registry? I will leave that question unanswered.

The committee has reviewed the bill and has seen fit to include that section. My colleagues in the House believe there is a risk posed. I do not see it quite as clearly as they do. The linkage could be drawn between someone who lives off the avails of prostitution, but it is not exactly clear how he or she would be a risk to commit a sexual offence later on. I understand the human rights and the issue involving people who are subjected to the criminal and other subjugation of people of that nature.

The statute fortunately retains procedures for deleting, exempting and terminating the registry. However, in every case, it requires a court application. I regret the removal from the Criminal Code of a section which, in my view, was balanced, proper and guided these provisions in all of the years since they were first enacted in the 1990s. The last amendment to these sections occurred in 2007 under the Conservative government. It is not clear why it has decided to revisit it. I can see the general purpose, but three years later, it is not clear to me what the motivator is at this time.

I want to point out the section that was dropped, which states:

The court is not required to make an order under this section if it is satisfied that the person has established that, if the order were made, the impact on them, including on their privacy or liberty, would be grossly disproportionate to the public interest in protecting society through the effective investigation of crimes of a sexual nature, to be achieved by the registration of information relating to sex offenders under the Sex Offender Information Registration Act.

That provided the court with the opportunity, before a person's name was included in the registry, of saying no. In this case, the circumstances, the position of the victim and the offender were such that there would not appear to be any public purpose served by including the convicted offender in the sex offender registry. The facts might have simply been a one-off, a bad day, a family situation that was corrected, any number of explanations.

I regret that provision is gone and that our judges will not have the ability to balance the positions of the offenders and victims and the needs of future law enforcement. At least if this bill passes, it will be gone.

I want to refer to a concept that other members have called the automatic inclusion of people in the sex offender registry. What the government has put forward is a huge list of crimes, some of which I referred to earlier in my remarks. We are holding out that it is those offences that cause the inclusion in the registry. At the end of the day, people are being included in the registry, not offences. The statute seems to forget that we are dealing with people and not offences. I call it a meat chart approach.

I have not been able to determine if any offences of this nature have been left off the list. It simply says everything having to do with sexual offences are going on the list, everybody convicted a first or second time is going to be going on the list and has to provide DNA, and that is how it is going to be done. That meat chart approach, which varies from the judicial override that I described a little earlier, runs the risk of including in our registry a whole lot of names and DNA that will not be helpful to police enforcement.

I will confirm that my party will support the bill, notwithstanding the warts and flaws. I wish it could be otherwise but that is the nature of passing legislation.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, in looking at the earlier debates on Bill S-2, one of the observations was that the condition of Ontario's sex offender registry was consulted four times more than the national registry. I am a bit surprised, but it probably is reflective of the need to update the National Sex Offender Registry.

The hon. member closed by saying that we are adding all these details. Have we identified the reasons why the registry has not been as effective as it was intended to be? Will the changes proposed in Bill S-2 lead us to some resolution of that?

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Mississauga South asked a very good question. The short answer is the bill really does try to make the system work better.

One of the key elements of a system like this is enabling police officers to obtain the information they need in relation to possible sex offenders and to obtain it quickly. This statute has buried within it procedures that enable police forces to access that. Up until now there were complaints that it took too long, that it was too cumbersome and that the federal registry just did not hit the nail on the head for those whose job it was to investigate a matter, find a missing person or investigate an offence. Procedurally, some of those difficulties and obstructions in moving information around have been identified, and this bill deals with that.

On the other hand, as I pointed out, there is the meat chart approach of incorporating a whole bunch of offences and automatically everybody who has been convicted of them. That raises the issue of clutter and volume. Does it really reflect the risk that police officers look for or does it create a bureaucratic unmanageable list that is less helpful because it has so much data on it?

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, one of the provisions of the bill that I have not heard spoken of very often is the issue of expanding the registry to include those convicted of sexual offences outside of Canada. Also, there is the provision to allow the police to notify authorities and other foreign or Canadian jurisdictions when a registered sex offender will be travelling to their area. I know the member is lawyer, but I am curious as to the mechanics of how these provisions would be delivered.

How are we supposed to know if a person is convicted of sexual offences outside of Canada if the country he or she is in does not report back? It would easy if it were the United States or a country like that, but there are a lot of countries in the world and I am sure we do not have treaties with all of them.

Also, on having the police notify authorities in other foreign countries when the offender will be travelling to their area, how in the world are we going to be able to determine the itinerary of the offender? Who are we supposed to be notifying? Who would be doing the notifying and who would they be notifying in the other country? Would they phone a border guard somewhere halfway around the world to say that so and so is arriving? Then we have all the language problems as well.

I am sure the member has some observations about this.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, there are two parts to the question. There is the incoming person and the outgoing person. The incoming person, as I understand it, is a person who comes back into Canada under the International Transfer of Offenders Act. That person has already applied to come back in, and I think most Canadians would see it as natural.

If the person had been convicted of one of these, and it is almost every sexual offence now, it would be recorded back here so that the person would be on the same footing as anyone who was convicted in Canada. That part is fairly straightforward, although it is sometimes difficult to compare offences committed in Canada with offences from other countries. However, do our best and we try to do it fairly.

The other part involves outgoing people, individuals who have been convicted here and who are on the sex offender registry and are going to other countries. I am actually a little nervous about that. On one side there is the possibility of the policeman in charge of the registry here sending all kinds of telegrams, notices and emails out, informing people of the individual to be visiting. I am quite sure it will not be run that way.

There may be requests from another jurisdiction, after the fact, in investigating a crime. Some guy from some city in Canada is visiting some place in the U.S.A. and there is a rumour so the authorities contact the Canadian police to ask if there is anybody like that around there who has a record like this. There is a place for that in police investigations.

I am a little bit nervous about having the police following every convicted sex offender around. I wish that the police could have followed Clifford Olson around. However, we need to have a balance between protecting the public and our individual freedoms.

I hope, as the bill is implemented, it will be implemented properly and fairly.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, I want to follow up with the hon. member on the aspect of the Ontario regime that has existed since 2000.

If we look at the timeline, in 2000 the Ontario government enacted Christopher's Law (Sex Offender Registry) and it seems to be working fantastically well.

In 2004, the federal Liberal government enacted the current regime. The hiccup seems to be that the police officers need reasonable suspicion that a sexual crime is being committed, is about to be committed or a reasonable suspicion of someone.

However, with the Ontario registry and the registry that is planned here, it is much less onerous. Does the member feel that is the only reason that the Ontario law, rather than the federal law, is preferred by police officers in Ontario or are there other reasons?

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it was always my impression that the federal law lagged in some respects in terms of its ability to bite down and really hit the nail on the head.

There are reasons for that. When Ontario as a province created its registry, it did it as a province looking after its citizens in its own jurisdiction, not as a criminal law jurisdiction. It was able to go directly to the public purpose intended and describe things with great precision and make the thing work.

In Ottawa, federally, when we passed our legislation, we had to pass it under the screen of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the evolution of our criminal law. We needed, in every case where we constrained an individual liberty or freedom, to make a case, a justification for it. In some cases, the law was not procedurally robust enough.

The province has kind of had a bit of an edge. It did not have to worry about the court review of the legislation and the charter scrutiny in quite the same way that the federal government did. That is why we are on our third rewrite of this legislation, whereas the province saw what the problem was, legislated it and put something in place that the police community was comfortable with. As far as I can see, there has not been any abuse.

Hopefully, the federal legislation has caught up to where it should be, it will work and there will not be any abuse.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill S-2, which is a very important bill but, as previous members have indicated, it follows on the good footsteps and foundation of steps provincially in Ontario and nationally by a former Liberal government in 2004. In that sense, it is trying to make existing law better.

Why do we need to make the existing law better? We could argue that in Ontario, Christopher's Law (Sex Offender Registry) is working quite well, which is probably very good for people in Ontario, but there are nine other provinces and three territories where Christopher's Law is not in place. Therefore, it is really important for us as parliamentarians for all the country to get it right.

In places outside of Ontario where the federal legislation is not working as well as the Ontario legislation and where in many provinces there is no registry provincially, we need to ask ourselves what the goal is here.

I am quoting from statistics in this regard when I say that the police have indicated that the present legislative framework does not allow them to prevent crimes of a sexual nature. Response times in the investigation of those crimes are critically important, especially in cases involving child abduction. Can we as a parent, a grandmother, a grandfather, an aunt, an uncle or just a member of a community imagine something more horrifying than having our child abducted or having a child in our community abducted?

All members of Parliament have either experienced that in their community and know people who have experienced it in their communities who react with shock and horror at even the prospect of this happening. As parents we all have those dreams and nightmares that we are at the mall or the hockey rink and one of our three to five children is gone because we turned away for a second.

Why is that response time so important after an abduction? Here are the statistics. Rapid response is so important because 44% of child victims are dead 1 hour after abduction, 74% are dead 3 hours after abduction and 91% of children abducted are dead 24 hours after abduction. This is not to say that every abduction is a sexual offence or a sex offender related offence but, sadly, most of them are.

I want to refer to some of the debate that has been taking place with respect to why the Ontario legislation is so much broader and so much better. It reminds me of a debate that we had recently with respect to protecting children from sexual Internet exploitation and there was a requirement to have Internet service providers report incidents of child exploitation or child pornography.

What we learned in that case is that the federal government of any stripe, as my friend from Scarborough--Rouge River indicated, operates on a much narrower principle of constitutional law with respect to our Criminal Code provisions and the acts that we enact here and that is the criminal law.

In the reporting of child pornography law, which we just studied, it was clear that the federal government felt that its criminal law power was not as broad as the provincial power under the family and child services act to protect children. Therefore, we saw across the country, in two instances, in Manitoba and Nova Scotia, where legislation has been passed protecting children from Internet pornography in a broader way by making it a positive duty on anyone who sees child pornography or child victimization to so report. That is because the child power resides with the provinces under our Constitution and we are enacting laws from the broader criminal provisions.

That is interesting because it has raised its head in this debate that perhaps the Department of Justice, in preparing the legislation in 2004, used the more narrow criminal law power and did not get as pervasive as the Ontario legislation in 2000 which was meant to protect all of the community no matter whether it was criminal in nature. I use that as a backdrop to say that Canadians may wonder why Ontario has the legislation and why federal legislation has been less effective.

It is my pleasure to indicate that we support the legislation which is meant to deal with the sensitive subject of sexual offenders. Members of Parliament, however, have a duty to deal with the crime in a serious way and to give the bill serious and thoughtful review. We would have liked to have seen Bill S-2 in its previous incarnation as Bill C-34 passed. The government knows there is no opposition to strengthening measures to protect Canadians from sexual offences, so I wonder why we did not get Bill C-34 through.

Bill S-2 aims to strengthen the current national sex offenders registry under the Sex Offender Information Registration Act that was enacted by the government of the day in 2004. The current framework is a national registry comprising mandatory information entered, such as address, telephone number, physical distinguishing marks, the offences and the characteristics of the victims, and it is information only available to police officers. Amendments were later made to the National Defence Act to bring it into sync with civilian laws.

As of April 2009, 19,000 offenders were registered in the national registry. It is important to say that the 2004 legislation had the effect of seeing to the registration of 19,000 sexual offenders. Only 50% of those offenders not criminally responsible, as in the mentally ill or youth, are under order to register.

The public safety committee heard witnesses who testified about the problems with the recent bill and possible improvements.

The Ontario registry system, as I mentioned, is used a lot more than the national database. The national sex offender registry is used, and I get to the real numbers of my comparison, 165 times a year, while the Ontario registry is used about 475 times a day. That is quite a difference. It is imminently clear that the Ontario registry is being used more often to prevent crime and to crack down on the crime the moment that it occurs, especially in the case of an abduction.

The reason for this much higher usage of the Ontario registry is thought to be that it could be used more preventively, something that cannot be done with the national registry as it exists. The national registry can be used only when police officers have reasonable grounds to suspect that the crimes investigated are sexual in nature. Police organizations have complained that this framework is hampering their work as police officers since the exact nature of a crime is not always known during an investigation.

While we all recognize the difficulty of the fight against sexual offenders, we also want to take a closer look at the morality behind the use of past offences to create reasonable doubt for the existence of a crime.

Our duty as legislators is to find a correct balance between the right to be presumed innocent, which is in our charter under section 11(d), and our duty to protect victims of sexual abuse, which no doubt comes from the override provisions in section 1 of the charter.

We cannot presume to have a suspect in hand for every crime because he has offended before. On the other hand, in crimes of sexual exploitation and in crimes of a sexual nature, compelling statistics suggest that there is a high degree of recidivism, so there may be a public duty that is higher and outweighs that of the presumption of innocence in this case.

At committee, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association was concerned about the provisions that grant the police additional powers to cross-reference the registry when they find someone acting suspiciously near a school. I have cited the statistics with respect to abduction and I suggest that the Ontario model is being used so much more and with such more efficacy that it ought to be adopted in these changes to this law.

The major effects on our legislative scheme would be several-fold. Bill S-2 has 65 clauses. Clause 19 adds 15 new sections to the Criminal Code. This is not an inconsequential bill.

I do not want to go through the 65 clauses and 15 new sections, but the main provisions of the bill in general are: to amend the purpose of the registry and give broader authority to consult, which seems very reasonable; to make registration automatic, which also seems reasonable based on the Ontario experience; and to make offences of a sexual nature designated offences for which DNA samples may be taken.

A lot has happened with respect to the use of DNA evidence in the courts. That is to be reflected in the changes to the Criminal Code, which is, after all, organic and needs to be updated.

There will be obligations for sex offenders convicted in Canada and outside Canada to register and provide information. There will be consequences for failure to comply with the order to register.

Members have talked about the aspect of persons outside Canada committing an offence and either returning to Canada or coming to live in Canada. They have a positive obligation to register. Our system of international crime statistic gathering makes it unlikely they would be here without the police knowing of their prior record, and therefore it would make our streets safer by having mandatory registration.

As I said, Bill S-2 provides for a regime. Fifteen new sections are added to the Criminal Code. For example, under clause 9 of the bill, the court may terminate an order if it is satisfied that the person has established that the impact on him or her of continuing an order or obligation, including on personal privacy or liberty, would be grossly disproportionate to the public interest in protecting society through the effective prevention or investigation of crimes of a sexual nature, to be achieved by the registration of information relating to sex offenders under the Sex Offender Information Registration Act.

And subclause 21(1) of the bill provides for the creation of a new offence for sex offenders who fail to comply with their obligations or an order made under the Criminal Code.

According to this bill, these new offences would carry maximum prison terms of two years and maximum fines of $10,000 or a summary conviction.

In general, I believe that this bill makes a number of worthwhile improvements to the law created by the Liberals in 2004. It is a new registration regime. There will surely be more room for improvement as the police learn to use this new tool. However, we have some concerns about the treatment of those found not criminally responsible on account of a mental disorder.

That is where I would conclude with the whole area of whether the net we cast by supporting this bill is too wide. We say we want to protect the public and make the federal legislation as wide as the Ontario legislation. We want to make sure our police forces are using the data bank of sexual offenders across the country to protect the public. We say that with some conviction. I think everyone in the House believes that.

We have to imagine a particular case where a person committed a sexual offence in his or her past. The person did it before being diagnosed with a mental ailment that caused the person to act improperly, criminally, and as a shock to the ethics and morals of the community in which the person lived. Perhaps since that time, the person has received medication and treatment and is no longer the same person as when the person committed the crime. That person may find himself or herself moving from community to community and being outed as a person who is on the registry of sexual offenders.

While that is within the aim of protecting society, this is where the rubber hits the road on the application of the law by the enforcement officials. This is where we have to put faith in our law enforcement officials, our crown prosecutors, and our judges to make the justice system work. This is where we hope that upon investigating someone who is registered in the circumstances just laid out, the person is treated fairly and with the good common sense that a cop on the beat would have in his or her community, to suggest the person is not the same person that he or she was before, this is not a person who presents a danger to the community in terms of recidivism, of performing acts such as those performed years ago by the person.

That is the non-legal aspect of this bill and all the bills we bring forward in the criminal justice area. We hope the players in the system use the discretion they have to investigate, to lay charges, to arrest, to defend, or to convict. Along the line of the criminal justice system, every player has some discretion. I have been in this House for five years and from day one I have been very adamant in suggesting to our friends across the way that they not poke sticks in the eyes of judges with respect to discretionary powers. They would not do it to police officers or to prosecutors, so why early on were they attacking judicial discretion?

I am pleased to report that we on this side have had some effect on the other side; not enough, and probably we never will, which is why we have elections. However, recent bills from the Minister of Justice have shown a willingness on occasion to restore and keep in place judicial discretion. That is what will make the difference between the laws we enact here being good for society or not being good for society.

I thank my colleagues who serve on the public safety committee. The committee report was replete with changes to the sex offender information registration act. Certainly the work of the committee was worthy. The greatest compliment is the imitation of one's work. The government, looking at the date on the calendar and realizing it had not done anything in this regard in five years, had to bring this legislation forward to replace Bill C-34. It looked at the work done by the committee and chose to do it. This is good. This means the committee was doing its work, in pushing the government toward a piece of legislation, with the caveat I mentioned about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms application at the federal level, but generally good legislation which we will support. It is primarily due to the good work of all parliamentarians who serve on a multi-party committee.

This is an example of how Parliament can work.

It has to be said that it is now 2010. The law was enacted in 2004. The Ontario law was there in 2000, and was working well. I am very firm in saying that as early as 2006, when various notable police officers appeared in Ottawa, to use a legal term, it was certainly reasonable for the players on the other side in the justice department to know that this needed to be updated. It is now 2010. The message is that we should get on with this law, but it should have been done four years ago.

With that I conclude. We will be supporting this piece of legislation. We hope it will make the streets and communities not just of Ontario but all of Canada safer.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Madam Speaker, there has been a theme to the questions that have been asked of the parliamentary secretary who led off the debate on the bill and others with regard to whether or not this is reflective of the government's propensity to put on a show to elucidate the feeling that it is getting tough on crime. It is doing it in a haphazard manner. The government is throwing all of these offences in the bill. It is calling for DNA sampling. It concerns me with all of these pieces of legislation that there is no integrated approach to dealing with crime and addressing the needs of victims.

The question for the member is whether or not we will be able to administer all of these laws with all of these tentacles and loose ends which do not seem to link together in a cohesive strategy to address crime.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Madam Speaker, that is a very good question. I am reminded of Monday night football. Last night the coaches of the two teams, the New York Jets and the New England Patriots, did not want the other side to know what they were doing.

In Parliament I really do wish that we dealt with criminal justice issues almost in camera. When we come to debate the issues, fine, but we all come together as a team to fight the other side, which is actually not the Conservatives or the other parties here, but it is crime and the people who commit crimes. They are the other side. We have a big song and dance about what we will do. It is pretty obvious, if we are on the other side, what we are not doing.

It is to the detriment of the Canadian public that laws are not passed as quickly as they should be. There is probably enough blame to go all around, but really, I wish, for the good of this community that we call Canada, there were a great depoliticization of criminal justice issues. That is my wish for Christmas.

[Alan Tonks, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

Madam Speaker, the member gave an excellent overview with respect to the exploitation for sexual purposes of those who are under the age of 16. One of our colleagues from Scarborough has indicated some of his concerns with respect to that.

One of the concerns of Chief Blair, who was interviewed last week, was on the perversions associated with Internet solicitation, and in particular, the manner in which it is targeting young people. His concern is that the resources are simply not available with respect to the technology interface that law enforcement agencies can mobilize to deal with that particular aspect.

Could my colleague give an overview as to whether the bill broaches into that area and whether the law enforcement agencies can be mobilized to deal with it?