Mr. Speaker, that is a very good question from my colleague. That registry was supposed to be a stand alone registry and I think it is, but the big stand alone is the cost of it and the non-compliance. It is possible to use that system or a similar system to track sex offenders. Again the problem is that I do not think the government has the wherewithal, the philosophical bent, as it were, to make people register. I think people actually believe that it is some kind of infringement on their rights.
In fact we found out a couple of days ago from the Ontario government that people have to be told ahead of time that they must register. The Ontario police cannot get the assistance of the Correctional Service Canada to tell inmates on their way out of the prison that they must comply and register. The service tells Ontario police “You have to do it because we're not co-operating”. That is how bad this is. The reason is that the government does not want the rights of individuals, criminals, sex offenders, quite frankly, invaded by telling them that they must comply.
To try to answer the question, I think it could be a very similar system, if not that system. We have talked to the gun registry people. They are so confused that they cannot even handle the gun system, much less sex offenders, but the software itself and the development are free because Ontario has said “We'll give it to you”. It is a stand-alone system and it is not a big system. I think the difficulty is that the government really and truly believes that it is more of a crime to invade the privacy of a sex offender in order to make sure he reports to a system than it is to protect people from sex offenders. I cannot believe that I live in a country with a government that is so far off base on such an issue.