I want to move to automatic registration. This was an issue that we looked at very carefully. The committee heard that there were a number of difficulties with registration. One of the prime reasons was that prosecutors across the country either don't make the application, or they forget to make the application, or there are plea bargains. Of course, we have evidence from the Ontario model. The Ontario model has a longer list of offences than this legislation does, unless that's been changed by this bill.
I also understand that one of the federal offences is sexual assault. This is a hybrid offence, meaning that you can proceed by indictment or by summary conviction. Mr. Rathgeber had some interesting comments to make about perhaps looking at separating off summary or conviction offences, which I think is something worth pursuing. In the committee's draft recommendation, which the minister clearly didn't have, we were about to recommend, at least in draft form, that we have automatic registration of offenders except in very rare circumstances that warrant a departure from this rule. We were going to determine those very rare circumstances.
I'd like to know, before going to absolute automatic registration without any consideration of possible exceptions, whether there was any consideration of that and what considerations there might have been