Yes, it slipped through. I sometimes wonder whether I have any friends on either side of this House.
I did note the enthusiasm with which the government stood up and said that this bill would require a royal recommendation. It is a bit of an attempt on the part of the government to take the wind out of the sails of the hon. member.
I want to talk, if I may, in what I hope the member will interpret as a constructive fashion and ask a number of questions on what I see as difficulties in the bill that I think the committee needs to address. The bill does put up a number of difficulties that all members need to wrestle with.
There is no argument with the principle of the bill and, as the member for Malpeque said, there is no real issue with respect to the need for something such as this.
The first area of concern is this: what is a missing person? This is no idle question. What is a missing person? There are a variety of indices and I will expand on that further along.
The second area of concern has to do with privacy issues. As can be appreciated, the individual right of persons to control their personal information, their DNA, the very core of who they are, is a paramount right in our Constitution and in our society. That needs to be addressed by the mover of the bill and explored thoroughly by the committee.
The third issue has to do with that famous old Canadian chestnut, provincial rights and federal rights. This is not merely an academic question, because, generally speaking, the police forces are not federal, with the exception of the RCMP, so presumably we would want access by the police who are municipal police officers, provincial police officers and federal police officers.
The other question is, do we want access to international data banks? If there is access to international data banks such as, for instance, those of the FBI and the CIA on missing person indexes, what are the protocols that would come up with respect to that issue?
The other question that has been alluded to by the hon. member is with respect to who is going to pay for this. How are the costs going to be shared?
The final issue I wanted to raise in our first hour of debate with respect to this bill has to do with the methodology that is used to collect samples. There are two essential methodologies currently in existence. The first one is a nuclear collection of DNA, which is a relatively inexpensive collective of DNA samples. The second is a much more expensive one, a mitochondrial collection methodology.
There is a question of resources. Would we actually use the most expensive methodology to collect? The bill is silent on this point. Again, this is an issue that needs to be addressed.
Let us start with the fundamentals, that is, what is the definition of a missing person? The bill is actually silent on this point. It has no definitions.
Ninety per cent of missing persons are in fact found within two weeks and 99% of missing persons are found within 22 weeks. So where do we start? Should we put somebody into the index after two weeks or after 22 weeks? Or is it another point? Also, do we need to have exhausted all other methodologies before we get the person into the missing persons index?
At the other end of the spectrum, when will the profile be destroyed? As I said, this material is the core of our identities, the core of the identity of each and every one of us.
What will be the protocol for the removal of the individual from the missing persons index and from that DNA collection? Will it be seven years, which is a general standard provincial average for an application for a death declaration? If a person has gone missing and has been missing for seven years, is that the point at which we would choose for an individual to be removed from the missing persons index once a declaration of death has been established?
What effects would a positive identification of human remains have in relation to the coroner with respect to vital statistics, let us say, with respect to licensing and with respect to insurance claims? All of these questions do need to be explored.
I want to reiterate to the hon. member that I am not trying to be a contrarian here. I think his initiative is a worthy initiative.
The second point I want to raise with respect to the bill is a flaw, so to speak, a contradiction between the first part of the bill, which says that the DNA profile is to be collected “only for the purpose of searching for and identifying the person reported missing”, and the second part of the bill.
The first section of the bill says it is to be done only for that purpose. However, the second part of the bill says, in the very next clause, “The Commissioner shall compare the DNA profile...with the other DNA profiles”, or in other words, crime scene indexes, offender indexes, and things of that nature, and “communicate” that to law enforcement officers.
As members can appreciate, that is a bit of a contradiction. Again, I would like to hear from the hon. member how he proposes to resolve that contradiction, but it is relatively easy to see. A person is reported as missing, a DNA sample is a given, the police officers compare that with a crime scene index, and they come back to the aggrieved relatives and say they have made a positive connection.
The positive connection is that their missing son or daughter is not the victim of a crime, but rather the perpetrator or a person of interest in the crime scene. I do not think that is quite what the aggrieved relatives had in mind: to put their son or daughter at a crime scene. Again, that may be an unintended consequence.
Another section in the bill says that the relative himself or herself can be required to provide his or her own DNA sample. Again, they may well do that voluntarily. Then we do a bit of a comparison, let us say, and an unresolved crime a number of years old turns up a positive match to the relative. Again, the relative was not intending to provide his or her own DNA for the purposes of a crime scene index.
I would be interested in hearing how the hon. member intends to resolve these difficulties. Again I want to reiterate that I am not trying to be contrarian or obstreperous, but I do need to have these kinds of questions resolved before we can fully consent to the bill.
The Canadian Association of Police Boards says that “privacy issues are going to be thorny”. I take it that this is a bit of an understatement. If the bill is left with the ambiguities that it currently has, these are not just thorny privacy issues. Not only will the bill not survive a royal recommendation, it certainly will not survive a charter challenge. I know that not only does the hon. member want his bill to be effective in here and to get royal assent, but he wants it to be a useful tool.
Another question that arises is with respect to a person who wants to disappear. We will take the example of an abusive spouse. Let us say that one night the victim of an abusive relationship just disappears. The person gets onto the missing persons index. Let us say that she has set up an entire new life for herself and then the missing persons index creates a positive match. Suddenly the person who wanted to disappear has been found.
I see that I am running out of time, but I have hit on only two of the points I wanted to raise.
Finally, with respect to jurisdiction, it is a significant issue, as is the methodology that would be used in regard to mitochondrial analysis or nuclear analysis of DNA samples. Both of these are significant issues and create great cost impacts, which the hon. member, having studied this, probably appreciates.
Again, I want to encourage the hon. member with respect to this bill. It is a worthy initiative. I think it is worthy of debate in this House and worthy of debate in committee.