moved that Bill C-240, an act to amend the Criminal Code (prohibiting certain offenders from changing their name), be read the second time and referred to a committee.
Madam Speaker, Bill C-240 would prohibit serious offenders from changing their names, provided of course that they get direction from the courts.
One would wonder why on earth this is a particular issue. It is unfortunate, by the way, that the bill is not votable because I do believe it would pass. I guess the issue of private members' business not being votable and yet being debated is a subject for another day. What the final outcome of that will be, I will never know.
The reason this issue has been raised for several years now, in fact for about eight years, is that I have been working with people throughout the country, starting with a lady by the name of Rosie in Windsor, Ontario, who was assaulted by an individual and left for dead. The individual was put in prison. He promptly changed his name and all his ID. He was released from prison, unbeknownst to her. She was not told anything. He came back to town with a new driver's licence, new ID, new everything, and began once again to stalk her.
I looked at that situation with her and found it to be accurate and true. When I made a bit of noise about it in the House of Commons, a number of letters started to trickle in about similar circumstances. Then lots of letters started to come in, so I did a fairly intensive bit of research and found that it was actually becoming common practice in the country. My findings show that the people who are doing it more often than not are sex offenders.
Next week I will be making a national presentation on all individuals who will be eligible next year for section 745 early release. They are first degree murderers looking for the old faint hope clause. We have done a fair bit of research on it, as we have every other year since the beginning. I find from looking at the first page of the list that two of the four people have applied for name changes in anticipation of moving into our society again.
One of them is Darren Andrew Kelly, a.k.a. Ryan Scott Brady. Anybody who knows about this fellow knows he is one dude who should not be out on our streets, much less have a name change and the opportunity to have his identity hidden while he is out in our subdivisions and communities. He is serving a life sentence for the rape and murder of a three year old girl in Sechelt. The girl was abducted from a motel room, molested and then murdered. Kelly is also considered to be the person responsible for the beating death of young Aaron Kaplan of Vancouver. Kelly is believed to have also molested the Kaplan boy before killing him by bludgeoning him about the head and chest with a 40 pound chunk of concrete. He sought the name change while in prison in Saskatchewan.
I sincerely hope that the individual who is no doubt going to speak against this from the Liberal side does not rag on isolated incidents and look for the extreme cases. I can assure the other side that is not the case. I have list upon list of all of these individuals, or many of them. In fact, I could not spend enough time tracking all these people down because there were so many of them. Suffice it to say that some of Canada's worst sex offenders, oftentimes not murderers but serious sex offenders who have done all sorts of things, are on this list.
I want to talk about Robert Gordon Stevens. The logic in this case is absolutely beyond me. Robert Gordon Stevens was a very serious sex offender who abused children. He went to prison. He met a fellow in another prison who was also a serious sex offender and who had changed his name from Willoughby to Oatway. Stevens and Willoughby-Oatway met in another prison and had themselves a little arranged matrimonial ceremony while in prison. Stevens then changed his name to Oatway, which meant that Robert Gordon Stevens became Bobby Gordon Oatway and Willoughby was also named Oatway. Bobby Oatway is the result of this. Bobby left prison and admitted to the public that not only was he a serious sex offender, a well known fact in British Columbia, but also that he was in his crime cycle.
A lot of things happened and he moved back in, but while we were dealing with this issue under the name of Bobby Oatway I had a call from a lady in Quesnel who said she did not think he was Bobby Oatway. She said that she had been one of his victims and his name was Gordon Stevens. We traced it and found out what had happened.
It is far too easy for serious sex offenders to hide in our society as it is, much less to allow serious offenders to change their names while in prison, while in the custody of Canada.
The bill makes provision for the courts to disallow individuals, where the circumstances involve serious crime, from changing their names or hiding their identities for a certain period. That way we can give some assurance to the public that if these offenders are out in public they are at least not disappearing as easily as the present kinds of technicalities allow.
I hope that some day the bill will come to the House of Commons and be voted on, because I find it passing strange in this country and in the House of Commons that the bill would not be passed and that we are having a change of heart on the national sex offender registry as well. The government says yes, it will develop a registry, but then says it already has one, which is not the case.