Mr. Speaker, as was identified earlier, we have a national flagging system and databases available for police to access.
When police officers get information that somebody is being released into a community, they can make a threat assessment and determine what the public needs to know. They can make the public aware that an individual is moving into a neighbourhood. Right now, there is a very high compliance with the system as it exists. The police are able to know where individuals are and are able to track them.
One of the concerns with putting that on the Internet so everybody can search people's names and pictures and then point to them on the street is that if they have not been identified by the police as being a particular risk, everybody will start moving underground and moving off the system, not telling police where they are. We have to be very careful that we get right.
The circumstance could very well be that if we brought this out, we would not know where dangerous offenders were. When police forces need to apprehend them or need to know what they are up to, they will have no idea where they are. That could be one unintended consequence.
I have talked about vigilantism. Some think it is good if people commit vigilante violence against offenders who already have served their time and have been released. People have said that to me. I do not think very many people feel that way about the families of the offenders. There is a very real concern with families being targeted, people who have committed no crimes and are completely innocent.
We have to take a step back, walk outside the cone of rhetoric we are thrown into, and ensure the policies we implement actually improve public safety and protect our children. Where the debate should centre, as we have this back and forth, is on that. The opposition party, the Conservatives, the New Democrats, the Greens, and the Bloc all have ideas. We can share that dialogue in a fashion where we understand others have ideas that they may feel are better than ours, but let us not go to that next point of saying that somehow members do not care about kids or care about dealing the predation. That is unbecoming and not worthy of this place.