It would be no surprise to hear that I meet with the Parole Board of Canada and Correctional Service Canada on a regular basis. Some of the reasons given are that they are worried about the failure of the equipment; for instance, a victim is set up through a video conference and the technology fails. That's one reason. I understand that most of this equipment is available at the different facilities.
These are just some of the things that have been brought forward.
As you may be aware, parole hearings are audiotaped, but because they weren't gathered for the purpose of sharing.... One of our amendments is that they should at the very least be allowed to listen to that audio recording. You could go to a regional office and listen to it. We're not saying to give it to them, but they could make arrangements to go listen to it.
There is currently a fund from the federal government that allows a victim and a support person to be funded to attend a parole hearing. That fund could perhaps be expanded for people to attend the offices to listen to the audio. Even if they attended the hearing in person, they may have been so emotional as to not fully grasp all of the information. They may ask if they could listen to the audio recording because they couldn't grasp everything that was there. Currently, they can't. We're saying that they should be able to and that it should be funded as well.
The other thing I want to flag is that if there are people who have accommodation issues, such as a hearing impairment, then obviously a transcript should be made available.