Thank you.
I'm Dr. Stacey Hannem. I'm the chair of the policy review committee for the Canadian Criminal Justice Association, and I'm also an associate professor of criminology from Wilfrid Laurier University. I do have some research background in released sex offenders and reintegration.
As criminal justice professionals, the members of the CCJA certainly are sympathetic to the public's desire to be protected from people who would commit acts of sexual aggression and exploitation. We've carefully read and considered the proposals within Bill C-26, and we want to highlight a few aspects of the bill that we have some concerns with.
The CCJA is on record many times as being opposed to the creation of mandatory minimum sentences. Of course there is a range of increases to the mandatory minimum sentences contained within this bill. I won't belabour the issue, I think my colleague Michael Spratt quite nicely covered the issues with mandatory minimum sentences.
However in particular in relation to this issue, we do want to highlight clause 7, which amends subsections 163.1(2) and (3) of the Criminal Code to remove the summary conviction option from the offences of creation of child pornography and the distribution of child pornography.
The issue that we see with this is that given the lack of clarity around our definitions of child pornography in a digital age, and given some of the cases coming out of the United States where children have indeed been charged with creating and distributing child pornography for taking photographs of themselves and sending these via text message or via other digital means to boyfriends, girlfriends, and peers, our concern with this clause is that any young person in that kind of grey scenario around child pornography would be subject to the mandatory minimum provisions of the indictable offence—the one-year mandatory minimum. Given the increasing prevalence of that kind of behaviour among young people and given the role of peer pressure, we would want to caution Parliament and the government against placing those kinds of restrictions on prosecutorial discretion by removing that summary conviction option.
The second issue I want to highlight concerns the increased maximum sentences. Across the board this bill raises the maximum sentences on summary convictions to two years less a day for a range of offences against children.
By setting that maximum at two years less a day, the offenders remain in provincial custody. The issue that we want to highlight around this is the fact that effective sex offender programming is not universally available in provincial systems across the country. Ontario has some quite good programs; Alberta has none. There is absolutely no treatment specifically for child sexual offending in the provincial system in Alberta, for example.
When you're considering these types of offences and you're thinking about this as an offence that is worth two years less a day, you might want to consider ensuring that the provinces have the capacity to effectively treat these kinds of offenders and to make those programs available across the country, both while in custody and also in our communities.
The third issue I want to talk about is around the issue of the publicly accessible high-risk child sex offender database. I'm going to preface these comments by telling you that the longitudinal research on sex offender registries coming out of the United States—we have no research on it in Canada—tells us that these registries are of limited use.
A study published in 2008 looked at the sexual offence rates during the 10 years prior to and the 11 years following the creation of the sex offender registry in New York state. It found that it had absolutely zero impact on arrest rates and charge rates for sexual offences. Of all people charged with sexual offences during that time period—10 years before, 11 years after—95.9% were first-time offenders. They would not have been on the registry anyway. Again, that suggests that this registry itself is of limited use.
When you make a registry like that public and you put that information into the public domain, it does have a range of unintended consequences. The first one I want to point to is lowered compliance. Ontario has a compliance rate with its sex offender registry between 95% and 97%. It's very effective in terms of compliance, whether or not you think it makes a difference in actual change.
The provinces that have public information available—Alberta and Manitoba—have considerably less effective compliance. They are at 84% and 88% respectively at the last available data. So assuming you think sex offender registries are a useful tool for police investigations, then you should be concerned with the implications of lowered compliance.
The second issue is the identification of victims. One of the things is that, if you take a look at the publicly available information from Manitoba in particular, you will see that in talking about the nature of the offence, it often identifies the child or the spouse of the offender as the victim, for example, which makes these people publicly identifiable. That is a problem.
The public nature also impedes reintegration. There's a range of issues we encounter around harassment of offenders and their inability to reintegrate effectively, and I would suggest to you that, if you actually care about reducing the risk to children, you would consider groups like Circles of Support and Accountability, which has a 70% effectiveness rate in reducing recidivism and is currently being defunded here in Ottawa. It's going to have to close while there are people coming out of prison wanting to have the support to reintegrate, wanting to be able to work with people to help create safer communities.
I would urge you to consider funding these kinds of programs with proven effectiveness, rather than funding longer sentences of incarceration.
Thank you.