Part of our mission is to monitor compliance and ensure that we have up-to-date data in there. I'll give you an example of the challenges.
We have some people who are convicted of designated offences and receive a custodial sentence, perhaps a federal sentence, and they're in the custody of the Correctional Service of Canada. Once they terminate their sentence, they have 15 days to report to the centres located across the country. There is a legal inability for Correctional Service of Canada to communicate to the national sex offender registry to notify us when an offender is being released.
As you know, offender release dates fluctuate. It could be day parole, warrant expiry, work release programs; there may be an intermittent sentence. There can be a number of different reasons why an offender, even though he's sentenced to five years, will come out before five years. Because CSC cannot notify the national sex offender registry of when John Doe is coming out of jail, we don't know when to start that 15-day clock ticking to monitor compliance.
Our centres have had to devise some unsophisticated secondary systems. In this electronic world that we live in, we can't incorporate this at present into the database and be notified automatically from Correctional Service that John Doe is being released in 10 days so we can prepare for the compliance. We have to devise these other systems and try to monitor compliance. It's not very efficient. It's going to become unmanageable eventually, just because of the sheer fact that more offenders are being ordered to the registry every day. At some point, the integrity of the data is going to take a serious downfall.
That's one example.
We also can't record other administrative things. For instance, we may have offenders who are deceased, and because of the specificity of the act, we can't add a little box that says “deceased”. If an investigator calls us and is looking for a potential list of suspects or persons of interest, we may inadvertently provide him with a list that has a deceased person on it, and they'll be essentially chasing a ghost or chasing their tails. That's not what we're after, and certainly that was not the intent of the legislation.
I don't want to sound overly critical. It was better than the registry we had before nationally--which was none. It was a positive step forward. Now that we've operationalized this, we're seeing a number of these restrictions on the administrative side that we need to have fixed.
Those are just some examples. I have an a range of them that I could bring up.