Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his excellent question.
One amendment the government agreed to covered situations where an individual who wants to apply does not have information about the arrest, such as the name of the city and the province. The documents relating to the criminal record exist only on paper, so the information might be in a drawer at some police station or courthouse. Sometimes the individual in question is somewhere else in Canada and does not have access to the documents or may not even remember where the arrest took place.
To simplify things, our amendment suggested that applicants could submit a sworn statement attesting to the details of the arrest and the individual's inability to obtain the documents. We were prepared to accept a sworn statement in order to process applications without proper documentation because accessing documents is very complicated. The Liberal committee members agreed to the amendment, but the government rejected it, and we have no idea why.
Now people have to fill out forms. Those 10,000 people with criminal records I was talking about earlier are marginalized and do not really have much in the way of resources. That makes it hard for them to know where to go to get the forms. Accessing the forms online is easier, so we suggested that systems should be digitized to improve the situation. The government rejected that idea too. If the government had agreed to that amendment, it would have made things easier.
Our requests were practical.