Mr. Speaker, there are a number of estimates with respect to the total number of people who have been convicted of this offence in the history of Canada. I have seen numbers. I do not have the data, because, quite frankly, as I said, these are not indictable records and they are not kept in a central national database.
We have seen estimates of 400,000 or 500,000. We believe that the overwhelming majority of people who have these convictions received an absolute or a conditional discharge, which did not have the effect of removing the conviction but discharges the record. Therefore, it is still important for those individuals who may not understand that they have a record to know that there is an opportunity for them to come forward and have a pardon issued for that record that in fact does exist.
One of the challenges, as I have mentioned, and one of the reasons we believe the pardon system as articulated in Bill C-93 is so important, is that these records do not reside in a single national database and are not verifiable by fingerprint. They reside in provincial and territorial databases, and it is therefore necessary for an individual to come forward and make application under the proposed system in Bill C-93 so that we can properly identify that record and deal with it in an appropriate way through a pardon system.