We're distributing Ms. Shaw's paper, which was prepared in response to questions we had concerning the effectiveness of the act as it's written, in terms of having the practical effect of getting rid of the records.
I think we're all agreed here. The idea is that we don't want whatever is being excluded here to prevent people from.... You know, if all of these sections are being taken out of the criminal record provision, then we don't want people who have been convicted of these things have it show up with respect to police activity or border activity or the things that we're trying to avoid.
I want to give you a reference to section 6.1 of the Criminal Records Act, which talks about how you get rid of these records. This talks about “Discharges”. There are marginal notes on these sections in the act itself. There are various marginal notes on the side—“disclosure”, “inadequate”, etc.—on various sections. For clause 75, for example, the marginal note says, “Convictions for certain offences”. You'll see that on the outside. That's the marginal note. Well, the marginal note on section 6.1 of the Criminal Records Act is, “Discharges”.
This is on the back page of Ms. Shaw's paper, by the way, for your information. Page 3 of Ms. Shaw's paper has a reference to section 6.1 of the Criminal Records Act.
Then there's the marginal note “Purging C.P.I.C.” on the outside of subsection 6.1(2). CPIC is the Canadian Police Information Centre.
It says: The Commissioner shall remove all references to a discharge under section 730 of the Criminal Code from the automated criminal conviction records retrieval system maintained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on the expiration of the relevant period referred to in subsection (1).
That refers to a discharge. The discharge, as you know, means that there was never a conviction. A person given a discharge is not convicted of a criminal offence, is found guilty but not convicted, and there's a certain period during which the discharge expires.
It's the same with the absolute discharge. If someone has an absolute discharge, it means they've never been convicted of a criminal offence. That's what section 730 says, that a judge may discharge an accused absolutely or with conditions.
An absolute discharge means it's done instead of convicting someone. It has the same effect as what we're saying here; you're not convicted of a criminal offence, or you've never been if you've already been, and that's what it says in subsection 6.1(1).
My argument is as follows. If it's necessary to have that kind of provision to get an absolute discharge out of the CPIC database, and that's the one that the police use, and peace officers, whether it be RCMP or local police.... I'm sure the MPs in the military have access to it as well, as do municipal police forces. We ought to have a provision here to ensure that if these records, potentially thousands of them going back, I guess, ever since they've been keeping these records and putting them in, are on that computer system with respect to these offences, then they ought to be removed.
That's essentially the question we asked: how do we ensure that as a practical matter, with the retroactive nature of these, we remove the criminal records of individuals convicted of certain offences under the code of service discipline?
The answer that was suggested to us was that we ought to go further, as suggested here on page 2, to accomplish the goal of Justice LeSage, where in his recommendation about reviewing the consequences he talked about:
There ought to be a full review of the issue of criminal records flowing from convictions at summary trial. I also recommend a review of the processes and procedures for entering information into CPIC and of the relevant NDA sections to avoid consequences disproportionate to the violation.
Looking at that, we considered the possibility of an amendment that would ensure the records get out of the RCMP database. It was suggested that:
...an amendment would need to instruct the Commissioner of the RCMP to remove all references to convictions that meet the criteria set out in the proposed amendment.... Such an amendment could be modelled on section 6.1(2) of the CRA, which sets out provisions for dealing with absolute and conditional discharges....
That's the model we have here, section 6(1) of the Criminal Records Act, and there's an explanation above that saying that—
