Madam Speaker, I am happy to talk about Bill C-3 and the Group No. 1 amendments related to DNA identification.
I like to think Canadians are concerned about health and safety matters above all else. There are some intensely personal questions that come to mind when we start thinking about health and safety issues. It is useful to get off the topic of our criminal justice system for a minute and talk about our medical system to show a commonality in how people approach these intensely personal decisions.
We have, for example, technology breakthroughs in the medical area occurring all the time. People buy into those technologies very readily. It is very simple to equate the medical breakthrough, the medical technology with personal health consequences.
We have had lots of examples today. This morning I was reading an article concerning mice and cancer and the two antidotes that they can put together to basically cut off the blood supply and shrink tumours to nothing. This research could possibly lead to a real breakthrough for humans. We will have no difficulty convincing the public at large, the funding groups, the health care deliverers or anyone else that this is all well and good, the way it should be and that it would have major consequences in a positive way for society at large.
We embrace new technology and people support it. We understand the benefits and want the benefits of technology.
We have a lot of advances in technology on the crime prevention front as well so why would we think a lot differently in this regard? I have some major concerns with this legislation because we and the government know the public wants DNA identification and a DNA databank. It wants all those things. We now know we have the technology as well.
The government has created Bill C-3, which we are debating now, and is selling it as if this will give the public what it wants. I am sorry, but when one reads the bill it is not giving the public what it wants. It is actually completely tying the hands of our law enforcement people to utilize this new tool in a way that is going to benefit society.
The only rationale I can come up with as to why the government would do that is that it shows a consistent pattern. We have seen that consistent pattern displayed in other aspects of criminal justice legislation brought before this House. It was demonstrated in question period today. The justice bureaucracy knows that the fallout from implementing the firearms registry, the way it is currently legislated, will actually lead to increased smuggling and to an increased premium for black market firearms. We have known this on an ad hoc basis for years.
We knew that because we had reports in the media at the time that bill was introduced thanking the justice minister from people involved in those various illicit activities because they were going to improve profit margins. This is not rocket science, but unfortunately it is a case where the government is legislating on a politically correct basis rather than on what will achieve positive results for society.
We have seen the same thing from this government in terms of conditional sentencing. That legislation went through in the last parliament. This is the legislation that allows judges to not impose prison sentences for various reasons. That can be an enlightened thing to do but it is not an enlightened thing to do when we are talking about violent or sexual offenders.
Reform amendments in the last parliament tried to ensure the legislation would apply only to violent and sexual offenders. We were told by the government that it need not be in the legislation because that is the way it would be applied. We are sorry, but that is not the way it has been applied. We have walking, talking, living examples of violent sexual offenders who have been given essentially no sentences, conditional sentences. These people are hazardous and risks to society. Many of them have reoffended because they have not been in prison.
Now we have DNA legislation that only scratches the surface of what is possible. We know national standards are needed with this legislation. Quality control guidelines and restrictions are needed.
Other technologies will be coming to the crime prevention front. If we are to tie the hands of our enforcement people on this technology, what are we doing? Are we denying ourselves the benefits of other new technologies? Another new technology has already proven itself once. It has many of the same benefits of DNA technology but it is all based on odour. Up to a month after it can be determined whether an individual has been in a room in that timeframe.
I have another example of the enlightened use of technology, which I believe happened in England. A perpetrator said in court that he had never been somewhere. It turned out that there was some plant material in his clothing. They compared a sample from his clothing with trees from all over that nation. They determined that the DNA from the plant material could only come from the place where the crime was committed. That is a nice non-intrusive use of DNA.
Why would we not enact the very best legislation we can when we have an obvious public taste for it instead of having the appearance of legislation? I do not know how to respond to that. We used to be able to go to someone with a basic toolbox when we needed to have our cars fixed. Now we have to go to someone with computer technology, with diagnostic equipment and so on. As society moves, our legislation has to move. As this bill is constituted, it does not cut it.