Thanks, Mr. Chairman. I'll be short about this.
The purpose of this act, as originally conceived by Parliament, was to create a registry to assist our police officers in solving crimes of a sexual nature. One of the underpinnings of the act is that a crime had been committed or was thought to be committed. If you read the first couple of sections of the act, they make it clear that Parliament at that time was very sensitive to balancing the interests of society and the rehabilitation of sex offenders, not necessarily because they were terribly concerned about the privacy interests of sex offenders, although that is an important factor, but because it was recognized by Parliament that ensuring that sex offenders are rehabilitated and reintegrated into society without reoffending is an important societal goal that we all have an interest in. So there was a balancing of those twin interests.
What we've done, I would submit, by our review, and what this bill does, is two things.
I'll back up and say one other thing. The other thing the act did, back when it was passed, was make registration subject to the discretion of the courts. There was obviously a recognition by the parliamentarians of that time that there were certain circumstances in which it was not appropriate for a Canadian to be subject to a registration order.
I also want to underscore, for all committee members as they consider my amendment, that what we're doing in this registry is an important thing but it's also an onerous thing. We are subjecting people who have committed a crime to orders for ten years to life that require them to do a lot of things that are relatively onerous. They have to let the police know when they are leaving their employer; they have to let the police know when they change cars; they have to let the employer know when they go out of the province for periods of time—I can't remember for how long. These are very onerous restrictions on people, and although they may be properly levied, we have to understand the serious incursion into people's privacy that this entails.
Having said that, I think one of the two major changes that this bill before us makes is to add prevention to the act. Prevention is a good thing, and as a word we're all in favour of it, but it does change significantly the original purpose of the act, which was not to prevent a crime but to help the police solve a crime that had already been committed or was thought to have been committed. We really didn't hear any evidence. I think it's fair to say that none of us heard any piercing evidence about what adding prevention to this act would look like. What does it mean? If police can access the registry to prevent a crime, does that mean that police can search the registry and then go visit known sex offenders in their place of work and follow them or surveil them? That might be good or it might be bad. But we didn't really ever consider that, and that's a significant departure from the act as it was originally conceived.
The second major thing this act does is remove discretion from registration. Through my amendments, I suggest that we have a statutory review of just those two aspects of the bill two years from now, so that two years from now we can look and see how automatic registration has worked. Maybe it will be like the Ontario experience has been and it will be fine. Maybe we will find that there have been no real miscarriages of justice. Maybe we'll find that there haven't been any cases of people being registered who ought not to have been. But I'd like to hear from prosecutors and people from the justice department, maybe defence lawyers and police, at that time to see how that is working.
I would also remind everybody on the committee that the automatic registration that we have adopted in this act applies to a wider range of offences—we all know that—than it does in Ontario, including, as I will repeat for I hope the last time, the hybrid offence of sexual assault, which could include sex offences on the more minor scale.
The second aspect of my amendment is that it would ask us to review how the prevention aspect has worked. So two years from now, we can actually see if it's been helpful. How have the police implemented it? Is it working well or is not working well?
That's the purpose of my amendments, Mr. Chairman, to review the bill just for those two particular aspects. I think it would give us a chance to really see how our amendments today are working.
