Madam Speaker, that is a very thoughtful question. The mischief that was brought to our committee when we undertook our review was that prosecutors had the obligation to file the application for registration initially in the old act. That was a problem because sometimes they neglected to do so. What New Democrats proposed was that we would have a system where an application was automatically made upon conviction. So the judge convicts, the application is automatically before the court.
What New Democrats do think is a misguided legislative reaction is to have automatic registration of every single person who is convicted. The Ontario system has automatic registration, but it has a shorter list of offences that qualify. The list that is under the federal system includes a longer list of offences, including the hybrid offence of sexual assault. Now sexual assault can be preceded by summary conviction for less serious offences, to an indictable offence because it is a hybrid offence.
There are some cases of summary conviction sexual assaults where it may not be appropriate to have that person registered with the court. New Democrats believe that judicial discretion and prosecutorial discretion is important to remain in the system so that our prosecutors and judges can weed out those cases where it is not appropriate to have automatic registration because we trust judges and prosecutors in this country, unlike the government. They are the ones who are experienced in dealing with this. Before I conclude, there are a couple of really solid reasons for this.
Sometimes it is necessary to get a conviction. A prosecutor will sometimes need to make an arrangement for a plea of guilty to a sexual assault and in exchange for that may think it is appropriate to not have registration as a result. So we may get more convictions by having prosecutorial discretion. Again, I will not go into this in detail.
I will point out that police officers themselves have testified that they do not want full automatic registration for every single offender because then every single person in the country will be registered and it slows them down if they have to check out every one of those offenders in a case where there is a serious sexual assault. They waste time weeding out people who should not be in the registry to begin with.