The hon. member asks what difference it would make. It certainly would not make any difference to members of the government. They always do what they are told anyway, whether or not it is electronic.
I am pleased to rise in support of the motion moved by my Alliance colleagues on their opposition day. I listened with interest to the solicitor general's reply. I might be mistaken, but I had the impression as I was listening to the solicitor general that he was speaking against the motion. Then of course at the end of the speech he announced that the government would be supporting the motion, which I think took the member from White Rock somewhat by surprise.
Sometimes it is hard to know what is really best, whether to have the government oppose a motion or support it. I have had this experience before. I was reminded today of February 8, 1999, when the government supported an NDP motion with respect to a national ban on water exports. The Liberals all stood and said they supported the motion. The next day they had a press conference to announce a policy that was entirely different from a national ban on water exports and said that they were living up to the opposition day motion to which everyone had agreed.
There is a bit of that going on here if I understand the solicitor general correctly. The argument he was making was that he was supporting the motion but he did not really agree there was any need for the motion or any need for what the motion calls for.
What that means to me is the government simply did not want to endure the political price of voting against this motion and being subject to the considerable vituperativeness of the solicitor general critic of the Alliance Party and others who would have called it to account for not supporting this motion. As I listened to the solicitor general it seemed he was saying the country already had one in the context of CPIC.
The reason we have the motion before us is that no one, except for perhaps the solicitor general and his parliamentary secretary, believes that CPIC as it now stands is anything like what the people who are calling for a national sex offender registry have in mind.
It is a legitimate point that CPIC could be transformed, changed substantially, and used as the basis for a national sex offender registry. That means it would have to include the kinds of information it does not now include. It is a legitimate option. If that is what the government wants to do, perhaps it could have put it forward in a much more clear and convincing way, but it did not.
People who are calling for a national registry are calling at the moment for a stand alone registry. Whether it happens in the form of a stand alone registry or in the form of a substantially transformed CPIC, it remains the case that the people who have to deal with it on an ongoing basis, the police forces represented through the Canadian Police Association, are saying that what we have now is not working, contrary to what the solicitor general has said, and does not constitute the kind of national sex offender registry which they and others think would be very useful to have.
For the solicitor general to sing the praises of what they are already doing and support the motion, while at the same time not really appreciating the worthiness of the arguments being put forward for a stand alone national registry, seems to me to be somewhat politically ambiguous, if not intellectually dishonest.
We support the motion. We think it has to be done properly. There has to be a balance struck between certain privacy rights and the protection of the public. If there is to be any kind of bias, it should be in favour of protection of the public, particularly protection of children who are vulnerable to people who want to exploit them sexually or in any other way.
If I understand what the mover of the motion had in mind the registry would be a separate thing. It would be established and maintained by the solicitor general. It would contain the name, address, date of birth, list of sex offences committed and convictions anywhere in Canada. It would be a national registry because it is not good enough to have it in any one province. We know all Canadians move around, but some people tend to move more than others, particularly if they are trying to lose themselves in the community and reappear in a way that their past is no longer with them.
However, what we and, I think, people who want a registry want, both for people in authority and people who may want to contact those in authority about people seeking positions of trust with young people, is for those people's pasts to in some senses always be with them. This is not because we do not believe people can be rehabilitated, but because we think people who are dealing with young people have a right to that kind of information so that we do not have more tragedies like those that have already occurred.
This is the reason why we rise in support of the motion. We think it has its limits and I do not think that anyone here thinks this will be the answer in that this does not change the psychology or inner consciousness of sex offenders. It does not deal with a lot of the social and spiritual problems that lead to sex offences in the first place and which sometimes create a kind of chain reaction, because we also know that a lot of people who are sex offenders are people who have been offended against themselves, although that is not always so. There is a lot of other work to be done and we need to see this in context.
However, it seems to me that it is something that is supportable. The motion is just that, a motion, and it does not lay down the details. I think as a House we should all be able to support the idea. Again, that is within certain limits of expectation, because it is somewhat debatable whether a registry would be preventative or whether all this would do is help police forces when there has been an occasion of an offence in regard to perhaps finding that offender sooner because they will know who is in the community in which the offence has taken place. That is not prevention, but enforcement, and enforcement is also important. To some extent it might also be prevention if this registry makes it possible for people to preclude previous offenders from having positions of trust with children which would present them with opportunities to reoffend.
Finally, I cannot resist this comment in closing. Listening to the solicitor general make the arguments against a registry, before he said he was in favour of the motion, it sounded an awful lot to me like what might come from the Alliance. He said that offenders would not all register, that they would not all do this or do that. That is his argument against a registry. It is funny that these kinds of arguments did not seem persuasive when people were arguing against the registration of .22s, but that when it comes to the registration of sex offenders these arguments are suddenly very convincing.