Mr. Speaker, this really was a very key part of the debate. We came up against a couple of challenges that would make that avenue particularly difficult, one of them being the technological challenges, in that all of our records are not held at the federal level in a federal database. Many of them are held at provincial and municipal levels and are not digitized. Therefore, we have no way of knowing where all those convictions are.
For us to go and do that, we would have to go and search for each and every one of those records. Some of those people might have already passed on. Some of these records are so old they could be from 50 years ago and that would take a lot of time and staff effort. We thought that if we made it inexpensive, easily available and we worked with the non-government organizations on the ground that work with these communities that were particularly hit with these kinds of convictions we could do as good a job by using an application method.