The purpose of the amendments is to permit, both domestically and internationally, information that links potential crimes together to be used for that purpose. Bill C-18 amended the legislation and changed it to “designated” offences. Previously, it was “criminal” offences. It's really an issue that says, why should we, by legislation, force all law enforcement agencies...particularly in Canada, because we're dealing with that issue as opposed to internationally. They don't necessarily have a designated offence system, so they would use it in accordance with their criminal system that they could take DNA for, but they could only use it for the investigation and prosecution of a criminal offence internationally.
Domestically, if we have the restriction that it could only be used for a designated offence and the police had DNA from a non-designated offence, even though it didn't qualify for data banking, they would be prohibited from using that match for that purpose. It may be unlikely that they would do analysis for non-designated offences, but if they did so, the question is, why should we restrict their use of that DNA to match a convicted offender and get a conviction for that purpose of matching them together? Otherwise, they would not be able to use the DNA match between a crime scene, if they had one crime scene...and then they find it's a convicted offender and that convicted offender is identified; but if they had information in their system that linked DNA to a non-designated offence that they had, they would be prohibited from using it. So we saw no reason to restrict the local police or any other police from using information except for the purposes of prosecution of a criminal offence.
I don't know if you understood the answer. Otherwise, we would be limiting information they were given from the data bank for only designated offences, even though it may help them convict someone for a non-designated offence. We thought it would be wise to remove that restriction, which was putting it back to the original language in the DNA Identification Act.