Thank you to both witnesses for being here today.
I would like to start with you, sir. You just mentioned that you can go back and check. We've had witnesses here, department officials, who told us the other day, when we were talking about how to deal with those people who might have had a charge reduced from something maybe a little more complicated to minor possession, that there's no way they can really check into that, that it's too complicated. They would only deal with the charge that they were convicted on.
What you and your counterpart here are saying is that they want to deal with the other charges, such as subsections 145(4) and 145(5), section 733 and subsection 145(3). Some of these might have been summary, and some were indictable, depending on the circumstances. Someone is going to have to look into that and you're complicating the whole process.
Some states in the United States have come out with a very simple program of which I am in favour. You just press a button. Someone designs the program that goes into CIPC and cleans out those charges for minor possession and they're gone.
Now you're talking about contacting people. How many of your clients can tell you their addresses since 1996, or where would we get hold of them since 1996? Where have they been?
It needs to be a much simpler process than you are explaining to us, because you're saying some of your clients do not have the capability of filling these forms out and may not be able to tell you the addresses. We need to be able to get it to the public somehow.
The simplest system, which I want you both to comment on, is just a program that can be written in this day and age of science and technology and computer programming. A program can be built that can eliminate it just by the press of a button and let the computer do the work instead of putting a human factor in there.
I see you both putting in a lot of human factor, which is going to be too complicated.
You can start, and Ms. Finestone finish.