Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for his astute comments and good questions.
The New Democrats, and in fact, all the members of the committee, I would hope, were working to make this registry even better.
As an example, some of the police testified that if we were to have automatic registration of every person convicted of an offence, that could decrease the efficacy of the registry because they would be registering people who are not appropriately the subject of an order. Let us say an offence is committed and we have only 12 hours. We do not want to waste police time tracking down and talking to people who are actually not proper subjects of such orders. That was not the New Democrats saying that, that was police officers saying it.
A member of the party opposite agreed with me in committee, when we talked about the sexual assault charge, that perhaps we should look at not having registration automatic for summary conviction offences but making it automatic for the more important indictable offences.
These are the kinds of things that all committee members were working on in a co-operative, all-party fashion as we wrestled to make the database better, when the minister came forward again with this legislation that did not wait for any of this well thought-out commentary.
To answer my hon. colleague's last question, no, the minister has given no indication to the committee that he will listen to anything. However, judging by the way he dropped this legislation on us, I would not hold my breath.