Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak today to private member's bill, Bill C-240, respecting the rights of offenders to legally change their names.
The ability to propose measures that are not among the government's priorities is an important element of parliament, one that can from time to time lead to constructive changes that have been hoped for. The government is open to suggestions from those who sincerely believe they are proposing positive and significant changes.
In this case, the sponsor of the bill has brought an idea to the wrong legislative body. The process and the policies that govern legal name changes reside within the mandates of the provincial governments. Each province has an official registrar or equivalent that grants or denies name changes and registers these changes in official records. The federal government does not have jurisdiction in this area.
That said, I think the goals of the bill are of interest to all members of the House. We all would agree that the need to keep track of convicted offenders is an integral part of the public safety equation on which the government stands firm. It is especially a concern if an offender changes his or her name in an attempt to hide from authorities.
It is of course critically important that government and police agencies across the country have the ability to track offenders released from our penal institutions. That cannot be overemphasized, and the government stands firm in its resolve to ensure that is the case. That is precisely why the government has invested in important and useful tools to keep track of offenders.
We need only look at the Canadian Police Information Centre, CPIC, and the national DNA databank as examples. The Canadian government has a national database containing information on all individuals who have been convicted of an indictable offence in Canada. It includes birth names, names chosen later in life, aliases and any other pertinent information with respect to the individual.
That database is called CPIC and it is maintained by our national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It is available to all police agencies across Canada. I can assure this House that CPIC has been a national success story in law enforcement since it first began operation in 1972. We continue to provide the necessary resources and tools, and it has become the envy of police forces around the world.
Let me tell the House why. CPIC is the primary tool used to identify suspects, to access outstanding warrants and restraining orders, to screen out sex offenders from jobs involving contact with children and to flag files of dangerous offenders. It is a database that serves over 60,000 law enforcement officers in each province and territory and it handles over 100 million queries from 15,000 points of access.
CPIC is linked to over 400 criminal justice agencies in Canada as well as internationally, and the government has committed millions of dollars to upgrade and renew CPIC to ensure it remains a valuable resource, which it is.
The government has also put in place another mechanism to identify some of Canada's most serious and repeat offenders: the national DNA databank. This is a tool that has, in my view and in the view of the government, revolutionized the way police work is done in Canada today. It is already proving to be a very valuable tool with respect to public safety.
The DNA databank is maintained by the RCMP. It contains a crime scene index that includes DNA profiles from unsolved crime scenes as well as a convicted offenders index containing DNA profiles from serious and repeat offenders. It has been in place since last June as a result of the wisdom and foresight of our government. It has already had an unprecedented number of matches between crime scenes and convicted offenders and it is helping police conduct their investigations more effectively and efficiently.
As you can see, Madam Speaker, the national DNA bank is yet another example of how the government is keeping tabs on criminals.
My point, and the reason the government has invested in these tools, is simple. Because of leading edge technology at our disposal, like CPIC and the DNA databank, we effectively keep track of offenders in a number of ways and not only through their names. We also use fingerprints and even their DNA. We do not, I repeat, do not, simply rely on criminals to tell us their proper names. That would be pretty naive.
The reality for criminals in Canada is that they can run but they cannot hide. This is especially important for victims of crime. I can assure you, Madam Speaker, and all members in the House, indeed, all Canadians, that it is the victims who are our first concern.
I have an enormous amount of sympathy for victims. I worked with them when I was chair of the Waterloo Regional Police Service and I can tell members that because victims are involved in our criminal justice system through no fault of their own, we should be there for them. While it is true that many wish to hear nothing further from their perpetrators, there are also countless victims who wish to be kept informed of what happens to offenders once they enter a federal penitentiary. In those cases, then, victims are most certainly brought into the process by Correctional Service Canada as well as the National Parole Board. Each of these agencies has active victim outreach programs which, upon the victim's request, provide information about the location of the offender, upcoming hearings, transfers, conditional release dates and other details.
It is important to realize that the agencies within the criminal justice system also talk to each other. Correctional Service Canada, for example, and the National Parole Board work closely with the RCMP to provide information that is relevant, important and of interest to the CPIC people.
It is the practice of Correctional Service Canada to provide information in each instance where an offender succeeds in formally changing his or her name. What that means is that all authorities who have a key role to play in the administration of an offender's sentence have access to information about the offender which is continually updated with important information the police authorities need to know.
On the other side of the issue are those offenders who make an effort to rehabilitate themselves and who want to put their troubled pasts behind them. These are the offenders who participate in programs that are available to them in the criminal justice system. These are the offenders who participate in mental health programs, literacy programs and educational opportunities. These are the offenders who try to make, and hopefully do make, an honest effort to put their pasts behind them, move on to a new and law abiding life and reintegrate into society.
I speak of the majority of offenders when I mention those people. Upon their return to the community some of these individuals seek anonymity to break the ties with their past so that they can make a fresh start. Regardless, the appropriate authorities still have a record of those people.
It is important to realize that even if offenders succeed in changing their names through a provincial government registry, that information is added to our existing federal government databases. The information is maintained by our national police force and shared with local police services across Canada.
In conclusion, it is my belief and the belief of the government that with the DNA databank, CPIC and the co-operation of the RCMP and municipal and provincial police services across this great country, we already have the tools to ensure these efforts are maintained in a positive way.
I point out again, as I did at the beginning, that it is beyond the jurisdiction of parliament to deal with this issue. For those reasons, then, I do not support Bill C-240 and I ask all hon. members in the House to do the same.