Madam Speaker, I am pleased to stand and represent all my constituents of Saanich—Gulf Islands. I want to make a few points on the sex offender registry.
It is important to make the point that on March 13, 2001, my colleague from Langley—Abbotsford brought forward an Alliance opposition supply day motion calling for a national sex offender registry. In that motion it had a timeline that the government would have this completed by January 2002. Again, that motion was discussed over two years ago and the government has taken over a year to actually get this one done. However, now that it is finally done, as my colleague just stated, I believe it is very inadequate in three main areas.
First and foremost, the most troubling aspect of the legislation is that it is not retroactive. There are literally thousands and thousands of sex offenders. There are people like Karla Homolka who will be released from jail in the coming years, if not months. She will not be on the registry. There are thousands more who are equally as bad and will not be put on a registry to protect the public.
The recidivism rate is reported as high as 50%, some at 40%, but there is no question that it is high. Some would argue that it is almost a disease. Child predators, child molesters and pedophiles do offend. They attack and prey on the most vulnerable in our society. I have to ask: who are we trying to protect? Who is our duty to? I have to believe that every member of the House would want to protect the most innocent and vulnerable in our society.
My daughter turned eight years old today and I cannot imagine for the life of me how any parent could handle anything happening to a child that is so innocent, so young and so vulnerable. It would horrify me but it does happen.
As parliamentarians we could go a long way to lessening the opportunity of that happening and, if it does happen, we could increase our opportunity to protect them before they are put in harm's way.
In my readings, where there are effective sex offender registries, if a child is abducted by a sexual predator or someone else, if the authorities can get to a database and do a search of the immediate area to find out if there are any potential sexual predators residing in either a one kilometre radius or whatever it is, the chances of success are exponentially greater of getting to that child or person before the child or person is murdered or actually put in harm's way.
We have to ask ourselves what the most important thing is that we are trying to do in the legislation. I question the simple fact that we have the ability to make this retroactive. I would argue that we are probably doing more to help sexual predators than harming them by putting their names on a registry. If they know they are on a registry, the ones who are borderline or may not be as severe, they may not reoffend if they know they can that easily be tracked down. We have such amazing tools now, such as DNA, yet we seem to have lost our way when we read the bill.
It is absolutely, completely unacceptable that the bill is not retroactive. That is the single fundamental flaw and because of that flaw alone, I cannot support the bill. There are other weaknesses in the bill, which I could support, but I cannot because of the simple fact that it is not retroactive, that there is going to be an empty database.
I urge the government to rethink this. It has just passed a motion not allowing any amendments which is incredibly unfortunate.
The bill should be retroactive. Our interests should be in protecting the most vulnerable in our society, protecting people the victims, not the sexual predators, not the offenders, not the pedophiles. Unfortunately we seem to have our priorities backwards.
There are other weaknesses in Bill C-23. They are twofold.
First, even when the bill comes into force, somebody who is convicted of a sexual offence will not go on the registry again. Forget about the retroactivity, which is so bad that we have not been able to deal with it, but if we move forward now into the future, just being convicted of a sexual offence will not put someone on the registry. The Crown will have to make an application in each and every case to have someone put on the registry. Again that is backwards. It should be automatic that once a person is convicted of a sexual offence, and we could list all the offences, that person would automatically go on the sex offender registry.
For the life of me, I have no idea why a drafter or even why the government responsible would do it this way. It absolutely makes no sense.
To top that off, there is another loophole for the sex offenders. They can make a case to be excluded from the registry if they can show that being on the registry would cause them greater harm than the public. I am at a loss for words. We are not talking about somebody who is accused or who maybe committed an offence; we are talking about a convicted sex offender. The person has been to court, has been tried and found guilty, yet somehow it would cause that individual greater harm than all society. Again we have it backwards. Again it is our children, the most vulnerable in our society. I cannot imagine a member in the House who could possibly support that, yet that is the way the bill is written.
Members stood in the House of Commons and voted for the government to create a sex offender registry and two years later, this is the best it could do. One wonders if the government is competent to govern. I mean that. When the government comes in with a piece of legislation such as this bill, one questions what its interests are.
In summary, first, it is absolutely, grossly inadequate that the bill is not retroactive. That alone is enough to not support the registry. Second, even after a person has been tried and convicted of a sex offence, that person is not put on the registry. Only if the Crown applies for that person to be put on the registry will that person be put on. It should be automatic. The default should be that the person is automatically put on the registry. Third, if the convicted sex offender can show that there would be greater harm to that individual than that of society, that person can be excluded. I would imagine that if one was on the sex offender registry, it would probably do them more good in trying to stop the recidivism.
I urge the government to allow an amendment to come forward to at least make the bill retroactive. Otherwise this legislation would be absolutely meaningless.