Madam Speaker, the Saturday headline in the Globe and Mail said it all “Pedophile back in jail for the fourth time”.
Finally after four convictions one sex offender has been required by the courts to tell police where he lives after he has been released from jail. A sex offender registry for one pedophile. What about the thousands of sex offenders who are on the loose and the police do not know where they live?
Last week the Calgary Sun headline screamed “Attack Stuns Community; Cops Launch Manhunt for Pedophile”. The newspaper reported that the assault took place Sunday night when a male armed with a knife rang the doorbell and forced his way into the house after the 14 year old babysitter answered the door. The pedophile locked the babysitter in the bathroom and then proceeded to sexually assault two sisters, aged 6 and 7.
Outraged Calgary parent Carrie Kohan said “What happened Sunday was the last straw”. She organized a rally last Friday to demand tougher first time penalties for child abuse and a national registry.
Fortunately the police were able to arrest the sex offender in this case within a few days. How much faster would they have apprehended this sicko if they had a registry of sex offenders residing in the city of Calgary? Would a sex offender registry have prevented this attack? We will never know.
It is terrible that the government has lost touch with the priorities of the people when it comes to fighting crime. Instead of implementing a national sex offender registry for convicted criminals back in 1995, the government implemented a national firearms registry for law-abiding citizens.
The Liberals by their actions demonstrated quite clearly that protecting women and children was not one of their priorities. They talk the talk but they do not walk the walk. This speech will expose the government's complete lack of political judgment when it comes to understanding people's priorities. The Liberals give the impression they are compassionate but the opposite is true when we examine what they did.
Until today, the government opposed a sex offender registry that could help police prevent crime and protect the public. Instead it supported spending $600 million on a useless gun registry. The police asked for a DNA databank for all criminals which would operate just like the national fingerprint system. However, the government refused opting instead for a system that protected criminals more than it did victims.
While the government refused to give police real tools to use to investigate sexual crimes and violent offences, the government chose to blow hundreds of millions of dollars on a gun registry with a 90% error rate. Now in an admission of defeat, the government is laying off staff, tripling production of registration applications and halting all attempts to accurately verify and identify firearms. This is another broken Liberal promise.
Members may remember in 1995 when parliament was promised that the gun registry would help police trace firearms. Police cannot trace something the registration system does not accurately identify.
Why did the government refuse to implement a national sex offender registry? We will find the answer in a government document entitled, “Report to Federal, Provincial and Territorial Ministers on Information Systems on Sex Offenders Against Children and Other Vulnerable Groups”. It was prepared by a federal-provincial-territorial working group on high risk offenders in October 1998.
The minister's working group reached a number of conclusions and arguments but not proceeding with the sex offender registry. I will spend the next few minutes outlining these reasons and arguments and commenting on each one.
First, the minister's working group said that a separate sex offender registry would duplicate a part of what has already available through CPIC. The same argument is true of the gun registry but that did not stop the government. Obviously the government thinks law-abiding gun owners are more dangerous than convicted sex offenders.
Second, the minister's working group said that a separate sex offender registry would be expensive and difficult to administer. The government has spent $600 million on a gun registry and employs about 2,000 government workers. Would a sex offender registry for convicted criminals really have been more expensive and difficult to administer than the gun registry it uses to track law-abiding citizens?
Third, the minister's working group said that the sex offender registry raises serious privacy concerns. On February 16 this year the Privacy Commissioner of Canada wrote me a three page letter outlining the serious privacy concerns he had with the information being collected and how it is used in the gun registry. He said the RCMP's firearms interest police database of some three and a half million Canadians, which is only supposed to have the names potentially dangerous individuals, actually included the names of witnesses and victims of crime. RCMP sources tell us there is a 50% error rate in this database. Canadians will be wondering why the Liberals were more interested in protecting the privacy of convicted sex offenders than they are in protecting the privacy of witnesses and victims of crime and law-abiding gun owners.
Fourth, the minister's working group said the administration of a sex offender registry would be particularly difficult with regard to the verification of identity. This is somehow an insurmountable administrative problem when trying to create a sex offender registry. However when it comes to the gun registry, the Liberals came up with a simple solution, force every law-abiding gun owner to carry a photo ID card. Would the government please explain to victims of sexual assault why it forces law-abiding gun owners to carry a photo ID but a sex offender does not have to?
Fifth, the minister's working group said the information in a sex offender registry would be of limited value unless supported by a more comprehensive screening process. The government did not hesitate to implement a more comprehensive screening process for law-abiding firearms owners. It even asked about marital problems, common law relationships and financial difficulties. These people have not even broken a law. Could the government please explain to the victims of sexual assault why comprehensive screening of convicted sex offenders is off limits?
Sixth, the minister's working group said that the Canadian Police Information Centre, CPIC, is so effective that it really is a national registry of sex offenders. In the very next paragraph it states that CPIC does not provide “compulsory registration of current addresses of sexual offenders beyond the end of any sentence”.
Why does the government not force convicted sex offenders to tell police where they live? A law-abiding gun owner can go to jail for up to two years if he or she fails to report an address change. If the Liberals force law-abiding firearms owners in the country to report every time they move, why not convicted sex offenders? The only conclusion one can reach is that the Liberals obviously think a law-abiding firearms owner is more dangerous than a convicted sex offender.
Seventh, the minister's working group said even with compulsory registration of sex offenders compliance would be low and that it would drive sex offenders underground. Gun owners who do not comply face a criminal penalty of up to 10 years in jail. Why does the government threaten sex offenders with 10 years in jail to see if they will comply? The Liberals are already claiming an 80% compliance rate with gun owners.
Eighth, the minister's working group said that without fingerprinting identification it would never be possible to be certain of the identity of a registered sex offender. The group says verifying the identity of the sex offender is further complicated by the falsification of records, misspelled names, duplicate names and can lead to serious problems of misidentification.
This is an every day occurrence in the gun registry where totally innocent people are confused with someone who incorrectly entered the RCMP database. Firearms officers are forced to investigate totally innocent people to confirm their identity. The RCMP records are never corrected so it happens again and again. Totally innocent people are publicly humiliated and investigated over and over again. Heaven forbid the Liberals would ever put convicted sex offenders through such a process.
Meanwhile, as the Liberal government put millions of law-abiding gun owners through this bureaucratic nightmare and humiliating hell making them pay a fee for the privilege, the Liberals gave thousands and thousands of sex offenders a free hand. Unfortunately some of these hands ended up molesting our children.