Madam Speaker, I have a few brief comments to make. I raised some questions this morning in the debate which have not yet been answered by the government. I feel it is incumbent upon the government before we move on to answer these concerns.
Another thing that concerns me with regard to Bill C-3 and the privacy issue that the government has raised is simply this. We have raised a lot of concerns about Bill C-68, which is a bill that the Liberals passed in the last parliament. They infringed on citizens' rights with regard to privacy and so on. Now, in relation to this bill, they are raising the privacy issue for criminals.
When it was law-abiding citizens they were not concerned with privacy. Now that we are dealing with people who have been charged with major offences they say we have a privacy concern.
We can put in place legislation to protect the misuse of information that people would gather in this process, but for the government to be more concerned about privacy when it involves a criminal than when it involves a law-abiding gun owner I think is a real contradiction and something that should concern Canadians a great deal.
I think it is incumbent upon the government to explain to us why it cannot put safeguards in the bill so that the information that is gathered by the police is safeguarded.
I will review what this DNA databank would be. They would gather information, a hair sample, a saliva sample, a small amount of cells from the human body of the person who has been charged with a serious crime. They could use that to either prove the innocence or the guilt of the person. Because of technology these days we can look at these things and examine them closely. The molecules that are involved in this and the science behind it I will leave for another discussion, but the explanation is that the science is now available to use this to convict people or to declare them innocent.
We should use these new tools. The police are asking for them. We should put them in place.
I was reading the history of this. When fingerprinting was first brought in people raised all of these same concerns about privacy and about whether we should use this kind of thing. Nobody would question the use of fingerprints now. They have become a tool that we accept.
Just because it is new, using a DNA print from a person should not just be dismissed by this government. There are some very good things that can be done. The police have the ability now to use this. It would help a lot of people possibly in prison who say they are innocent to prove their innocence. It has been used already. But it will also help the police to solve a lot of crimes. They are saying it would and I think we should seriously listen to them. The government has put too many restrictions on that with what it has done and some of the amendments in this group and others address those. I think we should look at them closely.