Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak on this proposed legislation.
I will state at the outset that I am in support of it going to committee for consideration and hopefully improvement. While this legislation has some of the bones that we need to improve the sex offender information registry, it is sadly lacking in some other areas.
The first thing I want to comment on is the process by which the minister and the government brought this piece of legislation into the House today. As a member of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, I must express my outrage at the fact that the committee is undergoing a statutory review of the legislation. It began that review after a decision was made in February to do so.
It has spent a considerable amount of time listening to witnesses and deliberating. It is in the final stages of creating its report and even as it is being written, the minister presents legislation in the House for consideration. This is an affront to all parliamentarians because it is incumbent upon us as parliamentarians to ensure that due process is always followed.
This is a hefty revision to the act. This has obviously been in the works for several weeks, if not months, and the committee was in the final stages of coming up with important suggestions on how we can change the legislation. Much of it is being done by the government's amendments but much of it is not being done.
The first thing I want to say is that it is unfair to committee members on the government side and on the opposition side to not have taken into account the legislative review that is being undertaken right now.
In that review, the committee has heard that the current sex offender information registry is sadly lacking and that it is not helping police. In fact, police officers have told us on a number of occasions that it has not helped them at this point solve any crime. Not a victim has been helped and no offence has been stopped by the sex offender registry as it is now in place.
A decision has already been reached in committee that this bill needs to be changed. We need to address several things severely lacking in the bill. At the same time, I want to put on the table that this bill is not, as it is being presented today, going to solve all those problems. Hopefully, our work in committee can begin to address that.
I look forward to the motion from the committee that will be brought forward to the House for its consideration on the fact that the government is not paying attention to parliamentary committees and, in effect, not listening to people through their elected representatives. That question aside, I want to bring up some issues that I hope will be addressed in committee that will make this legislation more effective.
I will begin by saying that, absolutely, when offenders are found guilty, they do surrender some of their rights. It is also important to say they do not surrender all of their rights. Even though offenders have committed tremendously horrible crimes, they still deserve to be protected by our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
I will be watching very closely to ensure that certain rights are still guaranteed even for the worst offenders among us. We speak up for them even though they make up the most unpopular group in our country. People need to stand up for human rights at all times.
The legislation seems, in my mind, to be lacking in several ways. First, police officers have called for a fuller understanding of what should be in the actual registry. There is technical information, but in the registry we need more information that will help both profiling and understanding for police officers to go after a potential criminal and to solve a crime when time is of the essence.
With many of the crimes that are happening, minutes and hours are at stake between the life and death of a victim. That means we have to give police officers every opportunity to find and apprehend a person who is potentially committing a crime at that moment. They need to be given every opportunity. That means that vehicle information, licence plate numbers and descriptions of vehicles need to be part of this registry.
That is something the committee is already in the stages of recommending. It is already beginning to look at that. There are a number of recommendations from witnesses who say it is critical for police officers to have vehicle information. They need to know what cars, trucks or vans these people are driving so they will not be hindered in their investigations.
It is also important to have information about the modus operandi, the way a previous criminal has actually committed an offence, so that police officers can look at patterns. They can look at how someone has done something in the past to predict whether not someone will do this in the future. If police officers are seeing a certain pattern invoked, they will be able to look at the sex offender registry and draw up the information to help them in their own investigation. This is absolutely critical because we are talking about minutes and hours that could save a person's life. The registry still does not seem to have a fullness in its quality of information that will actually help police officers.
I think what also has to be clear is that, in this process, we still do not have a full national registry that is effective. As the member for Edmonton—Strathcona was pointing out, there is no commitment from the government to put the kinds of resources into the police activity, investigative activity and ongoing activity, that will ensure that police officers have the resources to do that. For instance, in this legislation, there is an automatic taking of DNA samples. This will not be left up to the discretion of any judge. That means that the DNA database, which is also under statutory review, will be further burdened by more work with no promise of resources.
The most critical tool in many of these crimes is having a DNA match that can help the police and then later help in the criminal proceedings to ensure that we actually get a conviction. That DNA is being used more and more, but our DNA database, the registry and the RCMP offices that do that do not have adequate resources to undertake the work that they are currently doing. This will impose more work on them, so there needs to be a commitment from the government that goes hand in hand with this legislation to provide resources to the DNA database.
We have also been discovering from witnesses at committee that the work that has gone on to keep the registry up to date across the country is very uneven. The number of visits that police officers would pay to a house to check whether or not the person is still residing there, whether or not that person's physical appearance has changed and whether or not that person has been involved in a non-sexual crime are the kinds of things that are not being adequately followed up by police officers because they do not have the resources to do it.
Some jurisdictions maintain their annual or more-than-annual visits to ensure that the sex offender registry is up to date. Other jurisdictions have not seen people for months or years. They have lost contact with the people, so the sex offender registry information is no longer helpful. It is simply not going to work. Again, that is part of the resourcing that needs to go hand in hand with this legislation.
The police have also been asking for us to have the facility for geomapping and the ability to pinpoint where criminals are living in a way that allows police to move quickly in a situation. I am aware that the hon. member for Edmonton—Strathcona was talking about the fact that many of these crimes are actually committed by family members. That is a different set of circumstances. However, for crimes that involve abduction, kidnapping or predatory activities, police officers have to have the ability to ensure that they have every possible tool to get to the crime scene quickly when there is a missing person.
Our children are our most precious resource. We have to do everything we can do to ensure that they have the police in their hands, with the ability to find them, protect them and take care of them. It is where time is of the essence.
I want to close with where I started on this topic: the rights of offenders. I know it is an uncomfortable subject for most people in the House because we have to ensure that even though we are possibly taking discretion away from judges in these cases, we must still protect privacy. I am glad that the legislation seems to imagine that this is still not a publicly accessible registry but for the use of police officers only.
It is incumbent upon police officers to maintain that privacy, secure the information that they are carrying around with them, and take every possible chance to ensure that even those who have committed the most heinous of crimes have their human rights protected. It is uncomfortable for us to talk about it, but we must surely be part of that discussion.
The reason we need to be part of that is not only for their rights, but because we know that offenders tend to reoffend when they are under stress, when they are feeling further victimized. If we want to actually prevent this kind of crime from happening, we have to ensure that we are approaching it with fairness, with a preservation of human rights and civil rights, and that offenders are part of our community as well.