Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
This amendment would simply provide that two years after this current act receives royal assent, the Standing Committee of the House of Commons on Public Safety and National Security, or such other parliamentary committee as Parliament may designate, shall review and report to Parliament on the operation of the following provisions of this act: those provisions that would amend the Criminal Code to make subject to an order for automatic inclusion in a national registry the offences the act covers, and those provisions that amend the act to include the prevention of crimes of a sexual nature.
The reason is that there are two very substantial and profound changes to this act. The first, of course, is that the committee has, in its wisdom, now passed the provision for automatic registration; and the second is that we have added prevention of crimes to the purposes of this act.
I won't belabour the first point, but I think that because we've made such a substantial change to the legislation, we should have a review two years from now in order to see how that has worked out in practice, and to hear from law enforcement officials and the justice department about how that has worked. It would give us an opportunity to have an update on constitutional challenges to that section, because there may be a difference at that time.
I would point out that the original Sex Offender Information Registration Act, which was passed by the House of Commons in a previous Parliament, did provide for a mandatory statutory review, which resulted in this committee making an extensive review of this act. I would venture to say that this committee did some excellent work in reviewing that act, and I think we found some very important amendments and we took some important steps to improve the act.
One of them, of course, is that the previous act did not include putting vehicle licence plate or registration information into the registry. So we found that sex offenders who were using vehicles, perhaps around schoolyards, were not required to register their vehicles or licence plate numbers with the registry. We found that was a significant loophole in the legislation, and through the work of this committee we identified that.
So I think it's very important that we do the same thing two years from now, particularly when we've taken the substantive move of going from a prosecutorial and judicial discretion process to one that's automatic.
The second and final point of this is that we have added prevention to the purposes. Now, we're all in favour of prevention, but we don't really know what that means in the context of this act.
When this act was drafted careful parliamentary work was done and wording was created to specify that the purpose of this act is to keep communities safer from sex offenders while also recognizing that the rehabilitation of sex offenders is an important part of that. Again, I'm not just talking about rehabilitation of sex offenders vis-à-vis helping the sex offender. In terms of community safety, the framers of the legislation recognized that we have an interest in making sure those sex offenders do have successful rehabilitation to keep us safe from a reoffence. That's why there were certain privacy protections put in for the sex offender, because interfering with their rehabilitation was considered to actually have detrimental effects on their rehabilitation, which would in turn threaten public safety. Because we've added prevention now, and we've given police the ability to access the registry--not once an act has been committed, but at any time--I think we need to review that.
My final point will be this: under the previous legislation, the police could access the registry only if they had reasonable grounds to suspect that a crime of a sexual nature had been committed. We all agreed that was too tight a test, and that police need to access the registry in far looser circumstances. One of the examples was that if a child went missing and a mother or a father phoned in but they weren't sure that the disappearance was of a sexual nature, police would be prevented from searching the registry. We all agreed that was unacceptable.
So we all agree, as committee members, to expanding access to the registry. But when we add “prevention of a crime”, we leave open the possibility that police could actually go, let's say, to an offender's place of work. They could interfere in a detrimental manner with that offender. And my prime concern is that doing so would possibly interfere with the offender's rehabilitation and thus leave us less safe.
For all those reasons, I would suggest that this committee put in a clause as I have proposed that would cause us to examine this legislation, particularly those two those aspects of the act, two years from now. Let's see how those things are working. We may need to fine-tune this legislation to make it even more responsive to public safety and to keep Canadians safe from sex offences, which is the goal of all of us.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.