It is now nice that we have a few Liberals in the House, including the hundreds of thousands who are listening out their in the audience.
I was quoting Judge Bisson and his conclusions. He said that therefore, the guaranteed rights of a person by the charter having been infringed, the legislation would have been invalidated because section 1 of the charter could not save such legislation, the prerequisites having not been met. There was no equation to be made between the confirmed validity of the taking of fingerprints upon arrest and the taking also upon arrest without judicial authorization of bodily samples. Fingerprinting was not a search and seizure but the taking of bodily samples was and as such should not be performed without the greatest safeguards, the first of them being judicial intervention.
This is where I totally disagree with these judges. They are taking a position that there is a difference here. When people are arrested the police take fingerprints. Their fingers are placed on a piece of dirty stuff and then pressed on a piece of paper. They are kept on record and stay there whether or not they are convicted. From then on, if they are ever arrested in the future, the fingerprints will be on file.
They talk about this being an intrusion. They can take a DNA sample by a simple Q-tip on a person's tongue. They do not have to stick a needle in and draw blood. There are lots of ways to do DNA samples. What intrusion is that in anybody's system? When people are arrested they should be happy to have that done because they will be part of the system from now on and if they ever do it again we will easily catch them.
For people to be fighting this, I just do not understand.
It is great to bring in this legislation, but let us make sure it is going to work. There are literally thousands of unsolved rape and murder cases in this country. With the DNA samples of people in prisons right now we can solve some of those crimes immediately. The police know that, the people of Canada know that, so why do we have legislation that protects these criminals instead of bringing peace of mind to parents who have lost their children? People have lost family members and we have unsolved crimes.
I go back to the case I was talking about before. That man is going to go on trial for murder while an innocent person has already served time in jail. This man will be proven guilty by DNA. If we had his DNA 15 years ago we would not have had this miscarriage of justice.
I am sure we will have a chance to talk about this over and over again before the bill is passed. It is extremely important that the government look at this bill and accept some of the amendments being put forth by the opposition. I know from talking to some members on the other side that the same feeling comes from them. We are going to keep talking about this bill until we get some proper changes before the legislation is passed in the House.