Quality, the member on the other side says.
Now that the quality people are listening over there, this is what is wrong with the bill. The legislation will not be retroactive. This fear of offending the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on such things is ridiculous. Ontario made its sex offender registry retroactive. There was not one grievance filed against it. It is absolutely critical in the bill. Now that the government has come 50% of the way and could go all the way on this and agree with us, this is a critical point: the bill must be retroactive. It must record sexual offenders. It must record people in provincial facilities. It must record people currently housed in federal facilities. That is about 10,000 people.
If that does not happen, then individuals who are currently in prison will be able to get out of prison with a high risk of reoffending as sex offenders and will not enter the registry until after their next sentence. In fact what it amounts to is a free sexual offence of the offender. That does not make any sense at all. We brought this up at the time of the DNA databank. It should have been retroactive as well and would have resolved a lot of cases. I ask the government to please look at this issue.
Since I only have one minute remaining, I will assign two other problems with this legislation. The first is registered offenders will have the right to appeal their registration order. That is just crazy. They will all appeal this. The second is the Crown prosecutor must apply to the courts to have the offender added to the registry. It is crazy to allow lawyers the discretion. Put the offence in legislation and anyone convicted under that offence goes on the registry. Do not leave it to lawyers and judges to make that discretion. They fail consistently on that.