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.

The House proceeded to the consideration of Bill S-2, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and other Acts, as reported (without amendment) from the committee.

Protecting Victims From Sex Offenders Act

[The Deputy Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

There being no motions at report stage, the House will now proceed, without debate, to the putting of the question on the motion to concur in the bill at report stage.

[Gary Lunn, Conservative, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

moved that the bill be concurred in.

(Motion agreed to)

[The Deputy Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

When shall the bill be read the third time? By leave, now?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[Gary Lunn, Conservative, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

moved that Bill S-2, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and other Acts, be read the third time and passed.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to have this opportunity to speak at the third reading of Bill S-2.

The significance of this bill cannot be overstated. It will help police prevent and investigate sex offences by having access to more complete information about convicted sex offenders. The result is quite simply that we can better protect our children, youth and adults.

Our government is committed to keeping Canadians safe and secure, and the legislation before us today is a crucial step forward in helping us meet that commitment. Most importantly, we want to give police the information and tools they need in order to do their jobs more effectively. This is an issue that affects all Canadians, young and old, in big cities or rural centres. We are all looking for a system that better protects communities against crimes of a sexual nature.

It is obvious from the support this legislation has received from hon. members that this is a priority for all of us. Together we are making a statement that the status quo is no longer acceptable and that the national sex offender registry must be strengthened.

We are saying that we are committed to both preventing sexual crimes and ensuring that police are aware of all convicted sex offenders in our communities so that they can carry out their investigative work more effectively.

Since coming into power in 2006, our government has made it a key priority to protect our citizens. We have acted decisively to crack down on crime and to ensure the safety and security of our neighbourhoods and communities.

In the 2010 Speech from the Throne, we told Canadians we would take action to protect the most vulnerable in our communities, and that is exactly what we will accomplish with Bill S-2.

The support we have seen for Bill S-2 from all hon. members shows that we all want the same thing: a Canada that is safer for everyone. That is certainly the message we have received from Canadians who have raised important questions about whether certain provisions of the justice system are as effective as they can be.

Canadians have also asked why we have a national sex offender registry that does not include all sex offenders and why we have a registry that, frankly, does not offer greater protection for the most vulnerable among us, our children.

Bill S-2 continues our work to address the concerns of Canadians by amending the Sex Offender Information Registration Act and the Criminal Code to provide Canadians with a national sex offender registry and a national DNA databank that will more effectively offer Canadians that kind of security. It responds to the concerns and recommendations from victims' groups and from our partners in the provinces and territories with whom we have consulted extensively on how we can make the registry truly effective.

The bill also responds to the concerns and recommendations of law enforcement agencies. It includes amendments put forward by both the government and the opposition that further address shortcomings in the existing legislation.

First and foremost, Bill S-2 will ensure that every person convicted of a sexual offence is added to the national sex offender registry automatically and that every person added to the registry will also be required to provide a DNA sample to the national DNA databank.

At present, convicted sex offenders are added to the registry only after an application is made by the Crown. This leaves open the possibility that offenders can challenge the application and, if successful, their names would not be included in the registry.

By making the registration of sex offenders automatically, Bill S-2 eliminates the chance that police may not have knowledge of all convicted sex offenders.

This legislation will also transform the national sex offender registry into a proactive tool for law enforcement agencies. As it exists now, police can access information in the registry only after a sexual crime has been committed in order to help them investigate who may be responsible. This is certainly useful in bringing offenders to justice, but it does little to prevent crime.

With these changes in place, for example, if police see suspicious activity at a community centre, a shopping mall or a school yard, they will be able to access the registry in order to prevent a potential crime of a sexual nature. They will be able to find out whether the person involved is a registered sex offender and obtain other information to assist them in their work.

Since this bill was first introduced in the House, several other amendments have been made to strengthen the legislation. For example, officials will be authorized to include new information in the database, such as a registered sex offender's method of operating in relation to the offence. This would provide police with valuable information regarding how a sex offender carried out his or her crime and any unique aspects in this regard, which could help them identify potential suspects in a case more quickly and effectively.

Another change is a provision regarding vehicle registration information. I am sure we have all heard or seen reports of threatened or actual sex offences where the police have little to go on beyond a vague description of the vehicle involved, such as a white car with four doors or a dark brown van.

We have also seen how a detailed description of the vehicle used by an offender can lead to a quick arrest. With this change in place, registered sex offenders will be required to report the make, model, year, body type and colour of any vehicle registered in their names and any other vehicles that they may use on a regular basis, such as a company car or truck.

Bill S-2 also includes a provision that would allow travel notifications to police in other jurisdictions when a registered sex offender is travelling through or to their area. This is particularly important with respect to high-risk sex offenders.

This also includes the notification of police in other countries, in keeping with our international responsibility with regard to sex tourism and the protection of our children abroad. In this regard, Bill S-2 also includes provisions to include in the national sex offender registry individuals who have been convicted of sex offences abroad and then returned to Canada. These measures requiring proper sharing of information are significant improvements over the existing legislation. They would further ensure the registry is truly useful in protecting public safety.

Bill S-2 is an important piece of legislation, and the time has come to pass this bill and show Canadians that we are serious about ensuring their safety. This bill would ensure all sex offenders who should be on the national sex offender registry are on the registry, and it would provide police with the information they need to protect our children and other valuable members of our society from sex offences before they occur.

Bill S-2 is a thorough and effective response to legitimate concerns and recommendations that have been expressed by police, by victims' rights groups, by our provincial and territorial partners and by Canadians. I ask all hon. members to unanimously support Bill S-2 and help our government fulfill this pledge to Canadians to protect our most vulnerable from harm.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member and I had an opportunity to work on this bill in committee, and I wonder if he could comment on something that is regrettable and I hope does not happen again. I am looking for him to confirm that we will not see this happen again.

We in committee had the opportunity to hear from a good number of witnesses who came from all over the place to give testimony, particularly with respect to Christopher's Law and how we need to better model that example from Ontario federally. The committee had agreed to make time on the calendar to do a statutory review of the sex offender registry, where this had come from.

Committee members were obviously greatly disappointed that, mere weeks before we were about to publish our report with our recommendations from all of that work, the government tabled its bill and pre-empted that. In fact, if the government had just waited a little to hear about the work the committee had done, many of the changes the member is referencing would not have had to be changes; they could have been incorporated initially into the bill.

I am wondering if I could have the assurance of the member on behalf of the government that, in the future, if committees are working on reports or undertaking statutory reviews, we could be given the opportunity to at least be listened to before the legislation is tabled.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank all members of the committee for their hard work on this bill. As I indicated in my speech, there was good co-operation from all members. Some amendments were made to the bill, which I believe strengthen it a great deal, and that was through the co-operation and support of all members of the committee.

In fact, the committee waited far too long to get this bill moving; the government could not wait any longer and the legislation was introduced. However, it did not affect the efficiency of the committee in dealing with it. As I said in my speech, all committee members worked diligently to make sure that this piece of legislation moved forward in its current stage. It is a piece of legislation that all parties can point to as being a good piece of legislation coming out of this session.

[Maria Mourani, Bloc, Ahuntsic, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for my colleague.

When we did the report on the sex offender registry, we heard testimony from two organizations that conduct DNA analysis. If my memory serves me correctly, because it was almost a year ago, one was from Quebec and the other from Ontario. What is more, one of them was run by the RCMP and the other by a Quebec organization.

When we were talking to them, they told us that they still did not have a new budget agreement with the federal government for analyzing DNA samples, that there were delays of up to one year and that, in their opinion, their budget needed to be increased in order to deal with the backlog.

Was an agreement ever reached between these two organizations and the government? Will the budgets be increased? If so, by how much will they be increased?

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as I previously indicated, there was good co-operation from all members of the committee working together on this.

My colleague is right that there was some discussion about outside bodies requesting additional financing. Those discussions were taking place amongst the two levels of jurisdiction. At this point I am not certain as to what the final outcome was, but we certainly have not heard anything since from the body of which my colleague spoke.

I do not know whether or not those agreements are in place. I am certain that those discussions, if they have not been completed, will be finalized somewhere in the not too distant future.

[Maria Mourani, Bloc, Ahuntsic, QC]

Mr. Speaker, given that my colleague humbly said that he was not aware of the outcome of this issue, I would appreciate it if he looked into the matter to satisfy my curiosity and to bring everyone up to speed. I would like this information to be presented in the House or in committee so that we know whether an agreement was reached and whether the budgets were increased.

Since my colleague does not know, could he get that information to us?

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will endeavour to get the information as soon as I can and will give it to my colleague at a committee meeting.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise on this bill. It is a difficult emotional topic. There are probably not many Canadians who do not know somebody or have a family member who has in some way been touched by sexual violence. When it happens to a child, it is particularly heinous.

Obviously governments and parliaments should do everything in their power to go after those who commit the crimes, and in particular enable police, once a crime has happened, to apprehend the person quickly and to remove the young person from danger before something worse happens. When an incident of this nature occurs, the first hours are critical in finding out where the child is. Having an effective sex offender registry that allows police in a timely way to target their search and go after those who might have committed the offence is critically important.

If we look at where the legislation comes from, there was a mandatory review, as I referenced earlier, which required the committee to take a look at the sex offender registry. In undertaking that work, it became very clear to all of us that the federal registry was woefully inadequate, that other jurisdictions provincially had far outpaced us. It was certainly the case in Ontario where Christopher's law had been implemented with great success. It was a model all committee members looked at and on which we asked a lot of questions.

Witnesses came from different parts of Canada and we took the opportunity to hear from them. We were on the verge of releasing a series of recommendations, but that process was pre-empted by the bill being presented. Much to our disappointment, because the bill had been hastily crafted and prematurely presented, a number of the recommendations that we made were missing and had to be injected into the bill.

I understand that all of us want to move legislation through expeditiously, but so too it is important to have a proper study of legislation to make sure that when we pass something, we get it right. If we respond instantly to a headline and try to craft legislation on the back of a napkin and toss it out the door at a thousand miles an hour, mistakes happen, gaps are left and things get undone.

I think of the pardon legislation, as an example. I remember some four years ago the then public safety minister said in response to a horrible story, “We have got the problem fixed. Don't worry, it is all done”. It was only a couple of days after the event. There was no opportunity to study it at committee, to ask questions, to delve into the issue, and of course four years later the government came forward and said that there were problems with the pardon system, that we have to review it, renew it and change it.

There is an unfortunate tendency to ram things through. That process of ramming things through means that mistakes get made and things get left out.

What was egregious about this particular example was that we were literally a week or two away from being able to offer those recommendations, if the government had had the courtesy to wait. It is one thing to be ignored, but it is another thing entirely to not even be heard before we are ignored.

On the whole, this represents good legislation with the changes that have been made and is something which is supportable. However, I do want to comment, because as much as the parliamentary secretary talks about the co-operation in committee, I have to say I was deeply concerned that the member for Saint Boniface and a few other members, on television, when I was debating on panels both inside and outside this place, attacked me for not supporting the sex offender registry.

Where does this stem from? It stems from the fact that I asked questions, if anyone can believe such an outrageous thing. I asked questions about the fact that the list of offences was much longer than what was present in Ontario under Christopher's law. As an example, voyeurism was on the list. There was concern expressed about whether or not voyeurism should be on the list of offences that would put somebody on the sex offender registry. This concern came not only from me, but from police officers who were concerned that if the list was too broad, they would be visiting far too many houses when an incident happened. What they wanted was to have that scoped to make sure the houses they were visiting and the information they had would be directly addressed to people who commit the most serious offences.

The other example was of an indiscretion at an office party. As there was something in this bill about sexual assault, we wanted to make sure that if there was an indiscretion, and certainly somebody should not make unwanted sexual advances at something like an office party, that the individual would not end up on the sex offender registry. When a child goes missing, that would probably not be the first door to knock on to ask questions when there are other people on the list.

In raising these concerns, somehow that morphed both in the House and in television panels into some people saying that I did not support the sex offender registry. That is incredibly dishonest. Unfortunately, we see it in this House with enormous regularity. The Conservatives seem particularly obsessed with me and my riding. They rise on S.O. 31 statements saying that I love criminals and that I am against support for victims, but nothing could be further from the truth.

What the Conservatives are really saying is that I ask questions and that I do not blindly accept whatever is put in front of me. When anybody criticizes the Conservatives or asks questions, their first instinct is to attack, to try to bite off the person's head, as opposed to maybe listening and considering the fact that the points being raised are worthy of debate and discussion. In passing legislation, debate is an important part of the process that forms good legislation.

As much as I support this legislation as it is currently crafted, I have to express concern more broadly as to where the government is going with respect to its agenda. There are a lot of bills currently before the House. I think this is a good one, but there are many others that are not and it is leading us in a direction that is disturbing.

I came across an article in the New York Times that talks about the state of California's prison system. It bears reading excerpts from the article because it speaks to the model the government is chasing. While the rest of the world is running away, the government is chasing after what is happening in California.

The title of the article is “The Crime of Punishment”:

In 2005, when a federal court took a snapshot of California’s prisons, one inmate was dying each week because the state failed to provide adequate health care. Adequate does not mean state-of-the-art, or even tolerable. It means care meeting “the minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities,” in the Supreme Court’s words, so inmates do not die from rampant staph infections or commit suicide at nearly twice the national average.

These and other horrors have been documented in California’s prisons for two decades, and last week they were before the Supreme Court in Schwarzenegger v. Plata. It is the most important case in years about prison conditions. The justices should uphold the lower court’s remedy for addressing the horrors.

Four years ago, when the number of inmates in California reached more than 160,000, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a “state of emergency.” The state’s prisons, he said, are places “of extreme peril.”

Last year, under a federal law focusing on prison conditions, the lower court found that overcrowding was the “primary cause” of gruesome inadequacies in medical and mental health care. The court concluded that the only relief under the law “capable of remedying these constitutional deficiencies” is a “prison release order.”

Today, there are almost twice as many inmates in California’s 33 prisons as they were designed for. The court ordered the state to reduce that population by around 30 percent. While still leaving it overcrowded, that would free up space, staff and other vital resources for long overdue medical and mental health clinics.

I would add rehabilitation also. Further on, the article continues:

Among experts, as a forthcoming issue of the journal Criminology & Public Policy relates, there is a growing belief that less prison and more and better policing will reduce crime. There is almost unanimous condemnation of California-style mass incarceration, which has led to no reduction in serious crime and has turned many inmates into habitual criminals.

America’s prison system is now studied largely because of its failure—the result of an expensive approach to criminal justice shaped by fear-driven ideology. California’s prisons embody this overwhelming failure.

The Americans themselves are acknowledging that the path taken by California is a disaster and has led not only to less safe communities but to budgets being completely evaporated. Prisons are sucking like a vacuum from health care, education and infrastructure as they go these mega-prison complexes.

The problems are then compounded in terms of mental health. As we heard from the correctional investigator, the state of mental health in our prisons is deteriorating.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, I am curious as to whether the member for Ajax—Pickering is ever going to talk about the sex offender registry.

[The Deputy Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

The hon. member is making a point of relevance. I would encourage the member for Ajax--Pickering to remember that we are at third reading stage of debate and traditionally the Chair is more strict with the rules regarding relevance. I would ask him to bring his remarks to the motion before the House.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

My remarks are directly relevant to this, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the member's interest in what I am saying. I appreciate that he is listening. If he had been listening at the beginning of my remarks, he would know that I spent a good deal of time talking about the sex offender registry.

When we are dealing with legislation, it is incredibly important to ensure there is a balance in what we are approaching and how we are going to deal with it. We are dealing with legislation that needs to be passed but we have to consider the ramifications on the other legislation that is on the table.

There is no doubt this bill will have ramifications on people being incarcerated, and it should. It is going to put a strain on our prison system. We have to make sure there is space in those facilities to put the people who belong there. Sex offenders certainly do belong in our prison system.

Chiefs of police across the country have told us that our prisons are replete with the mentally ill. Oftentimes our prisons have no room for dangerous offenders because of the fact that prisons are being used as repositories for the mentally ill. When police encounter somebody who is mentally ill, they have nowhere to send that individual. They have to wait for the person to commit a crime so the person can be put into a prison. Instead of receiving health care and getting better, individuals are put into solitary confinement because there are no resources to deal with them. Being in solitary confinement makes them worse. They are released back onto the streets where, in a worsened condition, they commit a more serious crime.

When considering a bill like this one, we have to ask who populates our prisons and how much space we can make for them.

The government recently announced that it is going to move forward with double-bunking. What impact will that have on conditions in our prison system? In California, prisons are overcrowded and inmates are stacked one on top of the other. We can say we do not care what happens to inmates because they committed a crime, but the problem is that over 90% of them will come out. They are being stuck in overcrowded, unhealthy conditions where not only their mental health and their exposure to poor behaviour is at issue, but their rate of contracting an infectious disease increases. When over 90% of them come out, this becomes a major public safety problem and a major public health problem.

The government's approach on this issue is very germane to any discussion with respect to who we are incarcerating and who populates our jails.

What is the actual evidence? The government's prison agenda has been repudiated. California's system has been a disaster. The rest of the world is condemning that prison system yet the Conservative government is chasing after it at 100 miles an hour. What is the solution?

If we want to ensure there is room in our prisons for the people who belong there, and if we want to ensure that we have safe communities, then surely we should not be cutting back on crime prevention. Over 70% has been cut from the crime prevention budget. Over 41% has been cut from the victims of crime initiative. This initiative helps break the cycle of victimization.

As we know, unfortunately victims often become offenders, and this relates directly to sex offences. Young people who were traumatized or faced sexual violence in their past deal with that through aggression, through confrontation with our legal system. We hear from police that this is often the cause of some very violent and disturbing behaviour. Programs and services to help deal with victims were not in place.

If we want to deal with sex offences, it is not enough just to have a sex offender registry. We also need to invest in community infrastructure to make sure that victims who go through those experiences are given the support they need to ensure they do not walk down that dark path.

When I talk with the boys and girls clubs, church groups, or others who are involved in providing these kinds of services, I hear that their funding is being cut all over the place. They have to twist themselves into pretzels in order to get access to federal funding. This is egregiously wrong. What is so bad about it is that it is enlarging the pool of crimes that are being committed.

The government is building all of these new prisons while it is cutting from the very things that stop crimes from happening in the first place. This means it is feeding the beast. It is compounding the problem on top of itself.

Then the more the prison population grows, the less money there is for rehabilitation, the less money there is to make sure people get better. We then have to do things like cut the prison farm program, one of the most successful programs, which we had for over 100 years and which was studied by the world for how effective it was at bringing about rehabilitation. Yet it was cut because the Conservatives said they do not have the money. This is the track we are on, where it compounds and takes us to an ever-increasing population that makes us more and more unhealthy.

Aside from investing in those things, we have to listen to local communities. Instead of sending diktats from Ottawa about how these community groups have to twist themselves to fit into some bizarre federal scheme, we should be asking them through their community safety councils or other such agencies to tell us what their needs are, what can they do to build infrastructure on the ground to break cycles of victimization, to help people who have been victims, to make sure that when a crime happens it does not perpetuate itself, that it breaks cycles of addiction, and we know that in our prison system more than 80% of inmates are facing addiction issues. We should be asking them to deal with mental health concerns, to have them from the bottom up tell us what their communities need, and then Ottawa should be a partner and say here is how we are going to work with them.

As we are looking at ways in which we can go after people who are committing crimes, sexual offences, as I mentioned before particularly against children, the most egregious, is one of the reasons why I am disturbed that we still have not dealt with lawful access provisions that have been in the House for over five years now. In the lobby a few minutes ago I spoke about how this pertains to terrorism. But police have been telling us it also affects child exploitation. Police need the technology, the ability and the legislative authority to be able to chase after these predators and these people who would commit crimes online, to be able to get access to Internet service provider records, to be able to open up BlackBerrys that have encoded information, yet that legislation has been sitting on the table for five years with no movement, no action.

When the government's promise in 2005-06 to put 2,500 more police officers on the streets was not realized, members of the Canadian Police Association called it a betrayal. They said it would impede their ability to enhance public safety and go after some of these individuals. Yet the government is quick to pound its chest and talk about what a great job it has been doing on crime.

If I have an overall narrative here it is that while I support the bill and I believe the bill needs to be done, the government's approach to crime is heading in a very dangerous direction in the way in which it attacks people who raise legitimate concerns and raise alternative suggestions about how we should pursue these ideas. It does so in such a personal, visceral way. It tries to portray that somehow people who disagree with it do not share the same interest in overall public safety. It is dishonest and unbecoming to the House.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for his speech although I am not sure how much of it has to do with Bill S-2, which is the bill before the House.

He commented that he is opposed to throwing people into what he described as overcrowded prisons. If he truly believes that, I am curious as to why he constantly speaks against the government's initiative to build and expand the prison system. Would he prefer that the prisons remain overcrowded, or is his suggestion that we let criminals out and put them back on the streets?

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I do find it passing strange that the member rises on a point of order to say that I should not be talking about prison overcrowding and then his question to me is about prison overcrowding. But nonetheless, I welcome the question because here is the problem.

The government's plan is overcrowding plus mega-prisons. It is the whole enchilada and it is exactly what California did. It is the exact model. The incarceration rates were ramped up. There was a time when the rate of incarceration in the United States was only two times that of Canada. That was in 1980. The United States ratcheted that up by about 700%, so their rate of incarceration is about eight to one what Canada's is. Over that same period of time the rate of serious crime though was reduced in both jurisdictions at about the same rate. Canada was a little better. So this strategy was tried.

California built a whole bunch of new prisons. It was not that it stacked prisoners on top of each other. This ideological fear-based policy, which is what this is, it is not based on an ounce of evidence, this policy that is being undertaken that was tried in California means that all of these prisons are built and that is still not enough because it keeps ratcheting up higher. Even with all those new prisons now there is no money for roads, there are potholes everywhere, so now they have to be stacked on top of each other in the newly built facilities. That is where we are headed and that is what is wrong.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I think my hon. colleague's remarks are lucid and very helpful to the debate.

I do want to ask him a question about the automatic registration feature of the bill. The member talked, quite correctly, about how important it is for police in that critical one or two hours after a child abduction may have occurred to have immediate access to a databank that is accurate and helpful to them so that they can immediately start targeting sex offenders who may be present in the area.

We heard testimony before the committee that with automatic registration we will end up adding a whole slew of people to that database who probably should not be in that database, with the result that the police will have clogged data. In that critical one or two hours, the police will be searching and visiting people who may not be the appropriate targets of that investigation at the expense of visiting those sex offenders in the area who may be actual legitimate targets.

I am just wondering what his and his party's position is on automatic registration in this bill, particularly when it does not just copy the Ontario model, it actually expands the number of offences in the Criminal Code that are covered by automatic registration, including things like sexual assault, which the member has already pointed out is a hybrid offence and can include certain convictions that are not of the quality and character that would really, truly necessitate inclusion in the sex offender registry.

I would be interested in hearing the hon. member's remarks on that.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member not only for his question but for the opportunity to work with him on this bill. We have had a very constructive working relationship on this bill and others.

I think the member should get ready for a Standing Order 31 statement attacking him now for loving criminals or for being a criminal hugger, because he would dare ask a question.

The reality, of course, is it is a good question and it is one that needs to be asked and carefully considered. It is one that was raised by the police.

In principle, as we saw its application in Ontario, I certainly favour, as does our party, automatic registration. I think it has worked well in Ontario, and it has been effective.

The member raises a concern that I shared through the proceedings about automatically including some people who might be on the periphery and who were not intended to have been caught by that net, and winding up in a situation where we have a list that is simply too large to be useful.

The examples the member gave, and that I gave in my speech, that we had concerns about are worth mentioning and considering.

The other point that I am concerned about somewhat is the notion of moving discretion away from the judge to the police officer. If there is a commission of voyeurism, as an example, a police officer may be tempted to not pursue charges because they do not feel that the person belongs in the sex offender registry. However, previously they would have gone to court and gotten a lesser charge, and would have been able to establish a history if the person were to then progress from there.

I think that through the course of testimony and through the course of discussion, those concerns were largely resolved in my mind and in the mind of the party. The feeling is that the scoping is significant enough and the wording is clear enough so that that net shall not be that wide.

With respect to those concerns, I have them and have been posing questions about them, however they are not significant enough to warrant not supporting this bill.

[Maria Mourani, Bloc, Ahuntsic, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate the hon. member on his speech. I am letting him know from the outset that my question is indirectly related to the bill. I hope that he will not say, as the Conservatives did, that it is not relevant.

I think that the hon. member would agree that any bill must first ensure that there is a balance between human rights and public safety. I believe that he and his party are concerned about human rights, which are part of their human and political interests.

The member claims to be a human rights advocate and says that he strives to ensure that Conservative bills are not demagogic and that they find a balance between these two elements. After five sessions on the G20 and the G8, why has his party not requested an independent public inquiry on this issue to date? I do not understand. The relationship between that and Bill S-2 is the human rights aspect.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Mr. Speaker, these are two very different issues, but I can still answer the question.

First, with respect to crimes committed against young people, especially sex crimes, we all need to work together and leave politics aside. At the same time, it is very important for us to ask real questions about the bill to ensure that it is good and that it will work.

I am worried about the Conservatives because every time someone asks questions, the Conservatives attack them very personally, saying that this person supports criminals and does not believe what the victims are going through. That is not true.

As for the G20, in my opinion, there is no doubt that we need to force the Conservatives to answer a lot of questions. If we need a public inquiry and if we need to find another way to ask questions and get answers, then I absolutely support that. After our studies of this issue in committee, a number of very serious questions went unanswered.

If someone wants to demonstrate and share his ideas, and the government restricts his freedom and his ability to ask questions, that is very serious. We need to be able to get answers.

[Maria Mourani, Bloc, Ahuntsic, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I wish to inform you that, as you are no doubt aware, the Bloc Québécois will support Bill S-2 on the sex offender registry.

This bill is an exact copy of Bill C-34, as amended by the committee during the last Parliament. We supported Bill C-34 in principle. We heard from witnesses who reinforced our position and we put forward amendments that were agreed to. We also proposed amendments to Bill S-2, but unfortunately, they were defeated because the Liberals supported the Conservatives. We proposed amendments relating to the automatic registration feature that my colleague discussed earlier.

This is another example of how the Bloc Québécois works bill by bill in an effort to be constructive without sinking to the level of grandstanding that we have come to expect from this government.

We believe that we must make tools available to the police that, on the one hand, are effective at preventing and fighting crime and, on the other hand, do not constitute an unjustified and disproportionate breach of fundamental human rights.

As all of my colleagues have said, we all worked well together on this. Bill S-2 seeks to make the sex offender registry more effective and more useful to the police. This is a critical tool for preventing sex crimes and supporting sex crime investigations.

This bill helps strengthen existing legislation on sex offender information registration, which came into force on December 15, 2004. It would enable authorities to include more individuals convicted of sex crimes on the registry and would record more information about those individuals, including DNA.

This bill would also strengthen obligations that apply to individuals listed on the registry, such as those related to moving or being away from their residences for an extended period of time.

The bill adds new violations requiring registration and, in clause 5, makes some changes in the procedure by which courts will order inclusion in the registry.

In the case of so-called “hands-on” sexual offences, which are generally quite serious, the current regime allows the Crown to decide whether or not to ask the judge to have the person included in the registry. Under the new regime, which will be in place shortly with the passing of this bill, the attorney will no longer have to make the request; it will be a question for the courts to decide upon. It must announce its decision when the sentence is handed down and automatically order the person to comply with the requirements of the law; this is automatic inclusion.

In addition, this new clause abolishes the exemption, or exception, that currently applies when an offender establishes that their inclusion in the registry and the resulting impact on them, including on their privacy or liberty:

...would be grossly disproportionate to the public interest in protecting society...

Consequently, a hands-on sexual offence would result in automatic inclusion in the registry.

One thing is certain: at some point we will have to evaluate how the registry fits into all of this because there will be a lot of names in it. Witnesses told us that when there are a lot of names in the registry, it is less effective.

In terms of DNA samples—and this is somewhat related to the question I asked my Conservative colleague earlier—representatives from the two laboratories that do these tests clearly told us, when we met with them, that investigations are underfunded and that there are delays because it takes time for them to analyze the samples. These delays mean that these crimes sometimes go unsolved.

If it is urgent, they are efficient. But some samples may sit for a year before being analyzed because there are not enough resources.

Not only were they waiting for an agreement with the federal government, but they were also hoping to get more funding. It is all well and good to have legislation in place, but we need to have the means to enforce it. Will any money be invested in this bill? It is important to note that more and more people will be added to this registry, so there will also be more and more requests for DNA analyses.

Coming back to my point, when a direct sexual offence is committed, registration is automatic; however, for other designated crimes, it is up to the crown prosecutor to determine whether or not to apply to the court.

Clause 40 is another interesting point in the bill, because it makes a major change to how the registry can be used. This is very important, because it has to do with the notion of prevention. Under current legislation, the registry can only be used when there are reasonable grounds to believe that a sexual offence has been committed. Bill S-2 allows police to consult the registry for prevention purposes.

Consider the example of Cédrika Provencher, a tragic incident that took place not too far from us. What is interesting about this case is that the registry could have been consulted, which would have allowed for more effective prevention. However, according to the information we heard, some sex offenders had already been identified in that area, which the police were able to verify. As we know, when a child is kidnapped, it is important to find him or her within the first 24 hours. After 48 hours, the situation becomes even more worrisome, and as time passes, the chances of finding the child diminish considerably.

Clearly, this greater openness to prevention will have to be examined more closely to ensure that it is not used inappropriately. I trust the professionalism of police officers, but the fact remains that sooner or later we must have a closer look at this provision. Personally, I think it is a measure that could save lives.

The bill also proposes another worthwhile amendment. If this bill passes, there will be a correlation among offences that lead to inclusion in the sex offender registry and the sex offender's obligation, as I was saying earlier, to provide a DNA sample to the national DNA data bank. The bill will amend section 487.04 of the Criminal Code, which already requires a judge to order that such a sample be taken when a primary designated offence, a very serious offence, has been committed.

If the bill is so good, then why has it not passed yet? There are a number of answers to that question: first, this government nearly always introduces what at first is an absurd bill, ensuring that everyone is against it and wants to amend it; second, this government has gotten in the habit of putting on a show in the name of public safety; third, this government claims that these things are important and then turns around and prorogues the House, allowing all the bills to die on the order paper.

The opposition is not responsible for this delay. I have seen my colleagues work hard on getting this bill passed and on making worthwhile amendments to make the bill even better. I feel that the blame lies with the government, which unfortunately does not put its money where its mouth is. This is not the first time we have seen the Conservatives do this. I would not be bringing this up if I did not have a number of other examples.

Take for example former bills C-46 and C-47, which have been renamed and brought back to the House. The police have been calling for such legislation for over 10 years to help them conduct investigations, especially when it comes to the producers and consumers of child pornography. One of these bills ended up in the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights and the other, in the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. Then, all of a sudden, they disappeared. And then the House was prorogued. I have had to ask why a million times in the House.

Not too long ago, I do not have the exact dates, they reappeared with new names. And we are still not working on them. The government should bring them forward because I would like to start working on them.

This government likes putting on a show in the name of public safety and too often shirks its fiduciary responsibilities with respect to our collective security. We saw this recently with its irresponsible attitude towards the firearms registry, which, despite everything the Conservatives are doing, works relatively well, in spite of their amnesties and their many attempts to secretly abolish it through private members' bills.

I would like to come back to the fact that police forces want another tool to protect our children and to catch producers and consumers of child pornography.

Since 1999, police forces across Canada have been calling for legislation that, within a certain framework—this is not a free-for-all—would require Internet service providers to disclose IP addresses, which identify their clients computers, without being forced to ask for authorization in court, since these authorizations would be given later.

An IP address is like 411, a telephone book where you can find a person's name, address and telephone number. It is the same for a computer. This makes it possible to take action and save lives in an urgent situation.

I am not the only one saying this. On April 22, when he testified before the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, the former federal ombudsman for victims of crime, Mr. Sullivan, who was appointed by this government, said:

...if I were the Prime Minister today the Internet bill would be my absolute priority; it would be number one in the justice reform areas.

Mr. Sullivan gave a good picture of the tragedy the absence of such legislation causes. He said:

The longer we delay these initiatives to give law enforcement the tools, the more kids are going to be abused. I think that makes everybody angry.

That is true. It makes no sense that we do not currently have any regulations like these for the Internet. I can give some examples. In less than 10 years, we have seen a huge increase in the amount of child pornography on the Internet. We have gone from thousands of images to millions of images and videos. Every single image and every single video shows children being abused. I spoke to investigators from the child sexual exploitation unit who told me that the youngest sexual abuse victim they had seen was a two-week-old baby. That is unbelievable.

Imagine my indignation when, rather than passing a bill that would actually make it possible to save lives by giving the police important tools, the members of the House prefer to talk about other things. I would ask my fellow members to excuse me for being emotional but I find this so mind-boggling that I cannot even believe it. I think that a way must be found to let the police do their work and to also protect our children.

It is important to understand, as the Bloc Québécois did during the consideration of the bill that was the original version of Bill S-2, that the government must question and change its behaviour for everyone's benefit. It must do so to protect public safety and preserve Canada's credibility in the eyes of the world, in the eyes of the international community.

It is rather paradoxical that I, a sovereignist, am saying this. I strongly believe that Quebec and Canada are sister countries. So, when things go wrong in Canada, they cannot help but go wrong for us as well.

Unfortunately, we are still in Canada. Sometimes extraordinary laws are passed that help us to grow; however, there are other laws that diminish us completely both as individuals and as a society.

It is important for the government to understand that human rights are more than mere words. Human rights are fundamental. This institution is based on human rights in general and on the rights of children. The government must show its good faith by ordering a public inquiry on the G20 in Toronto. I asked the Minister of Public Safety and the government several questions and, as I understand it, they have shut the door on this issue.

I have sat on five committees. People came from everywhere to testify. There were organizations as well as individuals who had been arrested and who are no longer facing charges. With what we are hearing, if I were the public safety minister, I would call a public inquiry for the sake of the credibility of Canada and its police. Right now, it is all just suspicion and allegations. People are not crazy. They go on the Internet and see things. Articles are published and we hear statements in committee. It is a disgrace. A public inquiry needs to be called to clean all of this up. If it finds nothing, so be it. At least everyone will be reassured and people will say that some incredible work was done. But that is not what is currently happening; there is nothing but suspicion.

More than 1,000 people were unfairly arrested at the G20, and a tiny minority were incarcerated after charges were laid. It was the largest number of arrests made at a single event in Canada. It brings back bad memories, such as the October crisis in 1970. We have to wonder. I hear my colleagues opposite, who are at a loss. It might help them understand if they realize that the link is human rights. Based on facts that are gradually coming to light, many observers feel it is increasingly probable that respect for human rights was not a concern for the infamous G8 and G20 integrated security unit, which was headed by the RCMP. Everyone is responsible, but no one is responsible. It is as though—

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. Once again, the opposition members seem to be talking about everything except the bill before the House. I would ask that you caveat the member to talk about Bill S-2, which is the bill before the House.

[The Deputy Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

The hon. member for Ahuntsic has two minutes left.

I will remind the member to try to keep to the rules of relevance, especially regarding third reading of a bill, in her final two minutes.

[Maria Mourani, Bloc, Ahuntsic, QC]

Mr. Speaker, speaking of relevance, human rights have been trampled upon. The connection is very clear. Why was Bill S-2 created? Because there was balance, there were amendments and a better bill that should better reflect Canada was created.

At the G20, people were held for unacceptable periods of time in cages with constant bright lighting, with no beds and no covers despite the chilly air conditioning—

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order, which has already been made. No matter how much the member massages the air around her bench, no matter how much she torques her voice, she has strayed off the topic, in my respectful view. I would ask her to please, out of respect for all the members in the House, get back to the issue in the bill. I do not mind listening to members stray a little, but I am here to debate the bill and the member has strayed way off topic, in my opinion.

[The Deputy Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

I find I agree with the member for Scarborough—Rouge River. I will once again ask the member for Ahuntsic that she respect the rules of relevance in her final minute.

[Maria Mourani, Bloc, Ahuntsic, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will. I understand that the member had no problem with his own colleague straying. It did not bother him when his colleague started talking about prisons and whatever, but I get it. He is partisan.

I also understand his position because his party does not want a public inquiry. That is why talking about the G20 makes the members so uncomfortable, especially the members from the Toronto region. They hope to sit on the other side. It would sure be nice for them to get Toronto.

About Bill S-2, I only have a minute, so I will wrap it up quickly. I want to say that when I look at all of this information in terms of values—

[The Deputy Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

It is time for questions and comments. The hon. member for Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, I will certainly talk to the bill and try to be as relevant as I can.

The information in the national registry that can be collected only to enable police services to investigate crimes they have reasonable grounds to suspect are of a sexual nature has been amended. We saw this through Bill C-34. In some of the comments during the committee work on the bill, it was pointed out that something was missing. However, the need for reasonable grounds has been removed from subparagraph 2(2)(c)(i) of the act. As a result, police may collect information for the purpose of preventing and investigating crimes of a sexual nature. During the examination of Bill C-34, no witnesses raised the possibility of any abuse of use resulting from these amendments.

Would the hon. member please comment if these new methods, for which we are casting a wide net in the usage of this registry, especially when it comes to peace officers, concern her, even though those member will pass the bill?

[Maria Mourani, Bloc, Ahuntsic, QC]

Mr. Speaker, as I already said in my speech, if my colleague had been listening, there is no doubt that with this new legislation—and my NDP colleague also mentioned this—registration will be automatic in certain cases. Let us be very clear: there will be a wide range of sex offences that can be included in this registry.

I find it ironic that my Liberal colleague is asking me a question. The Bloc Québécois and the NDP proposed—or at least we supported the NDP's proposal—an amendment that would allow for clear guidelines to be established regarding this issue. However, the member's party and his colleagues voted with the Conservatives. It would have been nice to be able to clarify this automatic registration. According to the witnesses, there is a risk that a great many names will be added to the registry until, unfortunately, it eventually becomes ineffective. Personally, I think we need to examine it a little closer later on. The bill is before us, with all of the amendments that were made. Personally, I think we need to examine the real impact it has later on, after it takes effect. Now if any amendments needed to be made, the time to do so was in committee. It was up to his party to do so, rather than voting against it when the time came.

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

Mr. Speaker, police forces have indicated that the present legislative framework of the national registry does not allow them to prevent crimes of a sexual nature. Response times in the investigation of sex crimes are of critical importance, as the member knows, especially in cases involving child abduction.

The following statistics illustrate the importance of a rapid response and have been mentioned by my colleague from B.C.: 44% of child victims are dead within one hour after abduction; 74% are dead three hours after abduction; and 91% are dead 24 hours after abduction.

Police prefer, where possible, to use the Ontario registry, since it can be used preventively and the fact that there is a substantial gap between the statistics on the national registry usage. For example, the national registry is used 165 times a year, whereas the Ontario registry is used 475 times a day. Clearly it is time for us to look at adopting the provisions of the Ontario registry, and that is in fact what we are doing.

I know the member referred to these statistics as well. Does she have any further comments on this?

[Maria Mourani, Bloc, Ahuntsic, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. I completely agree with him. There was a problem with the law and I believe that this bill solves it. Prevention is vital when it comes to child abduction, as he illustrated so well. Finding the child alive or even just finding the child is critical. That may happen within 24 hours. After that, according to police statistics and statements, the ability to find the child alive diminishes and may be almost nil.

Therefore, it is vital that the police be able to consult this registry for preventive purposes. The only thing we will have to eventually look at—which could very well be done in committee—is the effectiveness of the registry. How many names are in the registry? Are there abuses? Has the necessary money been provided for the registry to be effective?

One thing is clear: it is all very well to have the best possible law but, without resources, the registry cannot be effective and will not give results. It could be an exceptional tool when it comes to prevention and saving lives, provided that it is given the required resources. It is very important to assess its effectiveness. If we determine that it is more or less effective, we must determine why and provide the necessary resources for it to function properly. Assessing whether or not something is working does not mean that it is bad; it simply means that we want to improve it.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for her work on the public safety committee. My question has to do with the statistics of abducted children being murdered: 44% of children are murdered within one hour of being abducted; 74% are dead within three hours; and 91% within 24 hours, all of which points to one inescapable conclusion. Police need immediate access to very accurate information. This leads to my question, which is on automatic registration.

Even though we did not hear from any real law enforcement officials who pushed the need for this, by pushing for automatic registration, we will be adding thousands more people into this database. This will force police to have to search those people in the critical one-hour and three-hour time periods, many of whom, it is uniformly regarded, should not be on the sex offender registry.

Could my hon. colleague comment on whether she thinks automatic registration will make it easier for police to get critical investigations under way that might save children's lives, or does she think automatic registration may impair the police in this regard and make our children less safe?

[Maria Mourani, Bloc, Ahuntsic, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his question. We had that very debate in committee. Witnesses told us clearly that the more names on the registry, the greater the risk it will not be as reliable. The problem is that hybrid offences or those more distantly related, such as exhibitionism, are subject to automatic registration. We will have to see whether this works.

Witnesses told us that we risk facing this problem, which is why it is important that we are able, after a year or two, to verify the effectiveness of such a registry with regard to this new automatic registration.

I cannot really answer the question because we will not know until we verify it. However, I agree with my colleague that witnesses told us that we run the risk of ending up in this situation. Some amendments have been proposed, but they have not been adopted. We are looking ahead. We will pass this bill and enforce it and then we will see what happens. We could assess and change things as needed.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to stand on behalf of the New Democratic Party of Canada to speak in favour of Bill S-2, which would make many necessary and important changes to the sex offender information registry in this country. Bill S-2 is the reintroduction of Bill C-34 from the last session, including amendments made by committee.

New Democrats support the bill and the concept of reviewing this legislation. We also support hearing from various stakeholders on how to improve the registry, both to improve public safety and to respond to the legitimate concerns of the police forces that work with this registry every day.

Bill C-34 was strengthened by amendments, including New Democrat amendments, to require sex offenders to provide their vehicle information and swiftly report any changes in their personal or work information to the registry. It is important to note that the public safety committee worked well and co-operatively in reviewing this legislation at the time this bill was brought forward, which I will talk about in a moment.

Despite all party support and the co-operative approach by the public safety committee, it has taken a year and a half to get this bill to the stage it is at today. Bill C-34 was introduced in June 2009 under a different minister but it was killed by prorogation. The government, of course, controls the House of Commons' agenda and it did not call the bill for debate until now.

It is relatively concerning and regrettable when we so often see the politicization of crime as an issue in this country. As I always do in my speeches on crime, I call on all members of Parliament to work co-operatively, intelligently and factually so that we can take real measures to make our communities safer, instead of just preying on people's fear and pursuing policies that we know do not work, that we know do not make us safer and that we know are prohibitively expensive.

It is important for Canadians to know that this legislation, when it was introduced some years ago, contained a mandatory review clause so that, within two years of being introduced, the public safety committee, or whichever committee was responsible at the time, would be charged with reviewing how the legislation and the sex offender information registry worked in this country.

That is a wise provision to put into legislation and we should do more of it in this House of Commons. We should periodically review legislation to ensure it is achieving the results that we had hoped it would achieve but otherwise we may not know.

At the time the public safety committee was doing that review, we had heard from many witnesses, had gone through each major section of the bill in tedious detail and had caught a number of items we thought could be improved upon.

As the committee was writing its report to the Minister of Public Safety so he would have the benefit of its hearings and testimony from experts, police officers, government officials, people who work in the criminal justice arena from every angle and others, the government and the minister did not even wait for that report to come out on the mandatory statutory review. Instead, the government hastily and swiftly put this legislation together and introduced it into the House. In examining that fact, I think there is strong evidence that the government was playing politics at that time.

Why would the government not wait for the public safety committee to give its report and have the benefit of all of that study, testimony and co-operative agreement before it then drafted legislation, particularly when it was only weeks away? Why would the government do that other than to play politics with the crime issue?

The other reason that was regrettable is that, as one would expect with legislation drafted in haste for political purposes, the legislation had problems with it. I will give an example.

One of the things we found in the original legislation was that one of the critical pieces of information that a sex offender was not obligated to report to the registry was information about his vehicle, the make, model, colour, licence plate and registration number. As we all know, in some cases, sex offenders will utilize their vehicles as a way of luring children. They will go to playgrounds and try to lure children into their cars by offering them candy or luring them with a pet. This registry did not require sex offenders to report that information to the registry, both for cars they owned or leased. We caught that in committee and the New Democrats put forward an amendment to say that that was information that should be in the registry.

However, because the government and the minister did not wait for the report from our committee, they put legislation before the House that did not have that information in it. That just shows that not only is playing politics bad politically for this country, but it is bad from a public policy point of view and from a legislative point of view.

What is the sex offender registry? It is a national data bank that contains information on certain sex offenders who have been found guilty of designated offences under the Criminal Codes, such as sexual assault, child pornography, child luring and exhibitionism, or who have been declared not criminally responsible on account of a mental disorder but, nevertheless, engage in those activities.

Pursuant to the Criminal Code, it is the Crown that had to initiate the registration process. If a court ruled that the offender should be registered in the national registry, an order was issued requiring the offender to report to a designated registration office within 15 days following the issuance of the order of the offender's release.

In April 2009, the public safety committee was informed that the national registry contained the names of over 19,000 sex offenders in Canada. The registry was originally designed to help police officers investigate crimes of a sexual nature by giving them access to reliable information of offenders found guilty of crimes of a sexual nature or, again, found not criminally responsible on account of a mental disorder.

The registry has always contained information essential to police investigations, such as the offender's address and telephone number, the nature of the offence committed, the age and gender of the victim, the victim's relationship to the attacker, any aliases that the offender used and a description of any distinguishing marks or tattoos the offender might have.

I want to pause and say that through some good work done by the committee, we added to that list and put in language to the effect that added the person's modus operandi or any distinguishing ways that the offender repeatedly carried out his or her offences. That was also helpful information to police officers because they could identify patterns very quickly when they were investigating a potential sexual offence, particularly against children.

It is important to note that the public never has had, and would not have through this legislation now, access to the national registry. Only police officers can access it and only when they are investigating a crime of a sexual nature or, as I will talk about in a minute, when they are working to prevent a crime of a sexual nature.

Querying the national registry allows police officers to identify possible suspects among sex offenders living in a particular area when a crime of a sexual nature is suspected of having been committed, and also as a process, it should be noted, to eliminate certain people from a list of suspects in order to move the investigation in a new direction.

During her appearance before the committee, chief superintendent, Kate Lines, of the Ontario Provincial Police said that the registry:

...saves a lot of time for investigators, who can now move in another direction […] Taking someone off the list rather than identifying them has great value when investigative time is of the essence.

With that point in mind, the crucial factor in designing the registry and proposing amendments should be ensuring that those who pose a danger to the public are registered, but also equally important, that those who pose no danger are not on the registry because that wastes police time investigating pointless leads in those crucial minutes when lives are at stake.

Here are some statistics that were presented by Ms. Lines to the committee that illustrate the importance of a rapid response in these cases, particularly in cases where there is a potential child abduction. When a child is abducted in this country, Ms. Lines told us that 44% were dead within 1 hour of the kidnapping, 74% were dead within 3 hours and 91% of those children were dead within 24 hours.

What we need to do as parliamentarians is design a properly functioning sex offender registry that can give police accurate and quick access to the registry, and anything that slows down the police in those crucial minutes following a potential or real abduction of a child should be rejected out of hand by parliamentarians.

That brings me to something in the bill that is of concern. It is the use of automatic registration for a long list of offences. I would respectfully argue with the House that is another issue where politics and ideology dominated public policy and fact.

When our committee was studying the bill, we heard evidence from a variety of witnesses and we had debate and dialogue about the very issue of whether we should be going to an automatic registration system in this country. What that means is that automatically, upon conviction of a list of sexual offences, the person's name is put into the sex offender registry. The status quo right now and before the bill is passed is that there is discretion in the system. Right now, an application must be made to the court upon conviction and then the court will or will not order that person to be put on the registry.

The evidence we heard at committee from prosecutors was that sometimes prosecutors forgot to put that application before the court upon obtaining a conviction for a sex offence. Our committee addressed that concern and the New Democrats put forward an amendment to address that concern. The amendment was that immediately upon conviction, without any action required by anybody, the application would be before the court for designation to the sex offender registry. The problem would have been solved.

However, we then wanted to preserve judicial and prosecutorial discretion to ensure that in the odd case where it was not appropriate for a person to be put on the sex offender registry, that the opportunity was there for the court and the prosecutor to decide. Why do we want to have that discretion? Because we do not want to put people on the sex offender registry who should not properly be there because. if we do, we will slow down police officers when they are investigating an important issue. Police officers may end up having to knock on doors, make calls or talk to suspects who really have nothing to do with this kind of offence. That slows them down and it puts children at risk in this country.

The other thing that is important to remember is that, upon conviction of a sex offence, the burden falls on the accused to show why he or she should not be put on the sex offender registry, and that burden is a very heavy one. The accused must convince the court that his or her interest in not being put on the registry outweighs the public's interest in ensuring their safety is protected.

This is what we heard from a government witness about that issue. Mr. Douglas Hoover, who is counsel for the criminal law policy section of the Department of Justice, said:

We've had a number of Court of Appeal decisions on “grossly disproportionate” to confirm that the onus has to be on the offender. He has to step up. He has to prove this to the court's satisfaction. This is a very strict test. I think the Court of Appeal in an Ontario case used the term “in the rarest of circumstances”, which is similar to the language in a Nova Scotia Court of Appeal decision on the DNA.

So while there were some early and I guess interesting decisions in the lower courts, we're confident that right now it is working fully as intended,

That was the kind of evidence that our committee heard and the kind of evidence that I am proud to say our committee listened to when we were busy writing our report and when we were telling minister that we did not want to go to a full automatic registration system. We wanted to fix the problem of prosecutors forgetting or neglecting to make the application, which we did, and we wanted to ensure it would be very difficult for an offender to prove to the court that he or she should not be put on the sex offender registry. We could then preserve the rare circumstance where someone should not be put on the registry. We did not want this because we felt sorry for the person convicted of a sex offence. We wanted this because we wanted to ensure the registry was effective and that police officers would not have any extra burden on them when they needed full speed to investigate crimes of a sexual nature.

What happened? The government did not wait for the report and introduces this bill and puts in automatic registration.

Reference has been made to the Ontario model. The Ontario model does have an automatic registration system, but there is an important difference. The list of offences for which a person convicted in Ontario of a sexual offence who gets automatically registered in the provincial sex offender registry is smaller than the one in this bill. This bill has a longer list of sex offences that, quite conceivably, may result in someone being put on the sex offender registry who should not be there.

I want to pause for a moment on the constitutional question. We heard evidence before our committee as well that automatic registration was currently being argued before the courts as to whether it was constitutional. This issue has not been fully settled by the Supreme Court of Canada. In his testimony, Mr. Hoover of the Department of Justice said that if we went automatic, the constitutionality would be an issue. Therefore, that is another reason to be concerned about automatic registration.

I want to also comment on the addition of the word “prevention”. Under the current legislation, police departments can access the registry only when they believe a crime has been committed which they reasonably suspect is of a sexual nature.

We heard evidence that it was too tight of a test. Police departments need to have access quicker and they cannot be held down when they want to access the registry. The New Democrats listened to them, we heard that complaint and we acted. It is important that we widen the scope so police departments can access the registry when they need to and not be hamstrung by very tight tests of whether they can get access to the registry.

The New Democrats also put a really reasonable proposal to have a review of this in the next couple of years to see how it was working. By allowing police officers now to search the registry when they might want to prevent a crime is a good thing, because we want the police to be proactive, but we are also not exactly sure how that will be manifested in practice.

Just like it was a good idea to have the review of the sex offender registry by the public safety committee, where we caught many things that needed to be improved, we thought we wanted to do the same thing with this. When it comes to dealing with sex offences, particularly against children, we can take no chances. Parliament should be vigilant at all times, to be constantly reviewing legislation to ensure it is nimble, accurate and effective.

What happened with that amendment? It is not in the legislation to review the bill in two years time, and that is regrettable.

I want to conclude by commenting about what we need to do for victims of sexual abuse. It is a well known fact that a very high percentage of sex offenders were themselves sexually abused as children, not all of them, but a high percentage. Earlier this year Steve Sullivan, the federal ombudsman for victims of crime at the time, testified at our public safety committee. He spoke about the need for the government to fund child advocacy centres in major cities across the country. He said that for two years in a row he had recommended that the government put a very nominal amount, several million dollars, to fund these child advocacy centres so children who were victims of sexual abuse would have a place to go to get immediate help.

Not only is it important to help those children, but it is a proactive way that we can deal very quickly with the pain and suffering of victims of sexual offences so as to maybe interrupt that process where they themselves might grow older and have deviant sexual practices themselves. Therefore, it is good for public safety.

The government ignored those proposals two years in a row, but I am happy to hear that recently the government indicated it might be willing to fund such advocacy centres. I applaud the government for any move it takes on that side. It will have the full support of the New Democrats for every $1 it puts in to help victims of sexual offences, particularly children.

We support the bill. We have some reservations about automatic registration and about the way the access to the registry in terms of prevention will work out. However, the New Democrats will support the legislation because, at the end of the day, we want to ensure that victims are protected as much as possible.

I urge all parliamentarians to support the New Democrats proposal to come back to this issue in two or three years time so we can review how the bill has worked and see how we can improve it yet again. Once again, we want to ensure we get the legislation right.

The federal registry is less than 10 years old. It is very important that we continue to fine tune it to ensure it achieves the objectives that all parliamentarians and all Canadians want to see, which is to keep our communities safer and to cut down on sex offences in our country.

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

Mr. Speaker, I would be very interested in a finding out from the member what the government's timeline and time frame would be on the registry and how long it would be before we could see some real benefits coming out of the legislation.

The fact is we are looking at reviewing the process in a two-year time frame and that is good. Especially with the ground shifting and changing constantly, it is important that we take another look at this right now. However, once again I would like to get his views on how quickly the government will have the legislation implemented.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to make it clear that there is no proposal at this point to review the legislation in any time period. New Democrats are urging that this be done, but is not currently in the legislation.

The question of when the legislation will be in practice and working is a good one. A lot of that depends upon resources.

When we studied Bill S-2 at committee, we heard that it lacked the necessary resources to implement a registry. We heard testimony about the Ontario sex offender registry. Police and victims groups talked about that registry as a model. We heard that the national registry had an operating budget of between $400,000 and $600,000 a year. By comparison, the budget for the operation and centralized management of the Ontario model is close to $4 million per year, not including the expenses incurred by local police departments.

The bill would do nothing to increase resources for the sex offender registry and there is concern that it may download the burden onto already overstretched police forces, which is a continuing problem in our country. We hear from municipalities, in particularly rural areas, that the federal government keeps downloading problems to them without the resources to deal with them.

To answer my colleague's question, a lot of the effectiveness of the bill will depend upon whether the government puts the resources into making it successful, which I urge it to do.

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

Mr. Speaker, that was my point. The government gets the benefit for passing the legislation but, at the end of the day, it is essentially offloading a considerable portion of the implementation costs to the provinces. We have seen that with some of the other legislation, too. It is fine for the government to introduce its series of crime legislation, but, at the end of the day, it does so without providing full costing and it is downloading a lot of the cost to the provinces. That is unfair to Canadians. On the one hand, they support the legislation, but they do it in a vacuum because they have not been told what the final costs will be.

Once Canadians can attach a cost item to that legislation, then they would have a better idea of how to balance the two and maybe they would not be as excited about the legislation if they realized what the total costs would be.

Once again, we see the government doing the right thing in introducing the legislation and passing it to get the immediate pluses, but then the downstream of it is the funding of the legislation is being passed off to somebody else.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, that is exactly right. Just last week I met with representatives from the Canadian Federation of Municipalities. These are mayors and council members who represent every conceivable municipality and rural area in our country. I met people in my office from New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario and Saskatchewan. Their message was uniform. They said that their police forces and resources were stretched to the limit. They all talked about the federal government downloading obligations on to their local police forces without the necessary resources to fund them.

I fear we are going to widen the opportunity for police forces to search the sex offender registry. Our court system is going to put many more people on the registry, but it is going to fall to these cities and rural areas to actually implement it.

What happens if there is a phone call to a force in rural Ontario or Saskatchewan about an alleged child abduction? Let us fast forward to a year from now. There may be thousands more names in the registry for the police forces to search, but they will not have the personnel to do it.

It is not enough to play politics with a crime issue. It is not enough to make ourselves look tough, like the government likes to do on crime. What matters is whether we put the bucks behind the obligations.

There is no money in Bill S-2. The minister has not said that he will give federal money to rural areas and municipalities in order to beef up their police forces so they can make use of this new information. Make no mistake, until that is done, the sex offender registry will not be fully utilized and it will not be fully effective until that happens.

Talk is cheap. I call upon the government to not only make these changes, but to put money where its mouth is. The Conservatives talk tough on crime, let us see them spend tough on crime. Let us see them put dollars toward crime. I challenge the government to tell the House how much money it will give to rural and municipal governments to help them carry out these and other obligations that it wants them to carry out.

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

Mr. Speaker, I wonder whether the committee had the opportunity, through its witness process, to look into these costs. Did any members of committee ask the government to produce financial statistics as to what sort of resourcing it would provide for the legislation?

It is interesting to note that the Ontario registry is being funded to the tune of $4 million a year, whereas the national registry is being funded with between $400,000 and $600,000. That is a big difference. The provincial registry is being accessed in a day a huge number of times more than the national registry is being accessed in a year.

Did the committee make any sort of effort to ascertain the full cost of implementing the legislation?

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the short answer to that question is no. The committee did not have that information satisfactorily before the committee, nor did the minister or the government provide that information. What we do know and what we did discover from a variety of sources is that the resources for an expanded sex offender information registry have not been provided by the government. One does not have to be a public policy expert to know if that changes are made to the registry that will result in thousands and thousands more names and information being added to the registry, it will need more resources. We would need more people to input that data. We will need more police officers who will actually investigate that data when there is a potential sex offence being committed.

We should remember that the registry is being expanded in two different ways. The access to the registry is being expanded by liberalizing the test as to when police can access it, and we are adding many more people by putting automatic registration of everybody convicted of a broad range of offences into the registry.

Again, like a lot of things with the government, it comes out with the rhetoric but does not put the money there and does not tell Canadians how much money it is going to cost either. We have no idea at this point. The committee has no idea. There has been no evidence by the minister or by any member of the government that says that the effect of these changes is going to cost blank amount of millions of dollars, but what is predictable, is absolutely going to be the case, is that these changes will require millions and millions of dollars coming from somewhere.

The federal government criticizes the Liberals for downloading obligations onto the provinces in the nineties, criticism that is richly deserved because the Liberals did download billions of dollars of costs to the provinces, which caused harm to the provinces to this day. I hope the government is not hypocritical about it, because it is doing the same thing if it transfers these kinds of obligations onto local police forces across the country but then does not provide municipalities and rural areas with the funds to actually carry out those duties.

Once again, if the government is serious about cracking down on sex offenders, if it is serious about improving the sex offender information registry, it must give municipalities and rural areas the funding they require to carry out the very important work that is called for by this legislation. I challenge the Conservatives to do it. The New Democrats will continue to push them until they—

[The Deputy Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Scarborough—Rouge River.

[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?

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

Madam Speaker, the new remedies and new inputs to the system can be described as the kitchen sink, probably more modern than the Ontario legislation. The member has vast experience in municipal affairs and communities. He was chairman of Metro Toronto and he understands, and his late father was the mayor of his community. The member knows that, as Tip O'Neill would say, “All politics is local”, but all community policing is local by nature. We have to know our communities.

With the new tools, the registry allows police officials, and therefore elected officials, and the people in roles of responsibility, at the YMCA or the boys' club, to know who is in their community. I hope, and the member will understand, that the cop on the beat and the prosecutor at the court house understand the nuance that just because people are in the registry does not mean they are about to commit a crime. It is just a way of keeping the community aware of the possibility and to be prudent and vigilant.

We are not just talking now about people on the street, as the member asked. It is people who are predators in the ether, and the bill goes a lot further toward making communities safer in that regard.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety]

Madam Speaker, I certainly appreciate the fact that my colleague is going to support this. My colleague from Scarborough talked about something that never occurred, about a parliamentary secretary answering to certain things, but I will leave him to his own devices.

I am wondering if my friend is aware of the new legislation dealing with the electronic interception of communications that is now going forward. It probably addresses the issues that Chief Blair spoke of, whereas perhaps my friend can explain that this legislation has to do with the physical things in communities as opposed to the electronic intercept.

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

Madam Speaker, it is probably my fault because my speech veered into a piece of legislation we were talking about previously with respect to the reporting of child pornography. I think that is where the discussion got into the electronic aspect.

The bill clearly is to make people in the community aware of who is in their community. My community is policed by the Codiac Regional RCMP and as of last night there was a vote to renew that contract. Sadly, in our community we are not going to be certain that any of this legislation is going to be enforced by the Codiac RCMP, Canada's national police force, because the government has not given an answer on whether communities will receive a 10% contract contribution. So while we are in here talking about laws, it is the enforcement of them that counts.

The hon. parliamentary secretary knows that the people of Moncton are waiting for an answer as to why they are one of two communities in all of Canada who do not receive this 10% contract contribution. The mayor himself said it was vastly unfair and wants the government to take action.

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

Madam Speaker, I would like to ask the member about the cost of the implementation of this legislation. We are aware that in Ontario the costs run around $4 million for its system. The national registry costs around $400,000. Surely the government has some statistics of what the implementation and roll-out costs are going to be, or is it a case where it is simply going to download the costs on the provinces, because that is what seems to be happening with a number of other crime bills?

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

Madam Speaker, I do not have any information on costing, but it is not something unique for the government to propose a bill that says we will incarcerate people longer and there will be increased costs to this. Everyone thinks that is a federal cost. The Conservatives largely make up numbers in their budget documents anyway, so we all expect that. But they do forget the important aspect that my friend from Manitoba knows, that in the criminal justice system there are many sentences that are served in provincial institutions that cost provinces more.

In my province of New Brunswick, it looks as if it will be an awful year in budgetary terms. The last thing the new premier of New Brunswick wants to know is that he is going to have to pay more for the criminal justice storefront package that the federal Conservatives are trying to get credit for. It is as if the federal Conservatives are putting all the nice things in the window, but in the back rooms the little premiers are cleaning up all the mess. It is déjà vu all over again.

[The Acting Speaker, Denise Savoie]

Is the House ready for the question?

[Some hon. members]

Question.

[The Acting Speaker, Denise Savoie]

The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Acting Speaker, Denise Savoie]

I declare the motion carried.

(Motion agreed to, bill read the third time and passed)