Public Safety committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. It's a pleasure to be here again. I've had the pleasure of appearing before committee many times. It is a privilege to do so. I am the director general of the Corrections and Criminal Justice Directorate in the Department of Public Safety, formerl

Public Safety committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I'll speak very briefly to give a bit of context to the legislation. Mr. Yumansky will speak briefly about the process of registration and reporting. Then, I understand, Inspector Nezan will speak on behalf of the RCMP, after which Chief Superint

Public Safety committee  Again, that's a very good question. There have not been any evaluations to date of the national registry, simply because it is too soon. Now that we're in the fifth year of operation, I think researchers would say this is a point at which they can start looking at the impact of t

Public Safety committee  Mr. Chair, I'm the co-chair of the working group, along with my attorney general colleague from Saskatchewan. We have been looking at a number of these recommendations. In terms of sharing them, I do have to be cognizant of some expectations of confidentiality from the provinces,

Public Safety committee  As the other witnesses have said, I think it depends on what your measures of success are. Obviously, the most important one is the overall objective of being a useful tool for investigating crimes. I defer to my police colleagues on that matter at this point. Other measures we

Public Safety committee  Yes. The reported case law has indicated that there have been some situations in which the offender has made that argument and has been successful. I'd invite Mr. Hoover to comment.

Public Safety committee  We have heard from some officials from the working group that crown attorneys, on some occasions, simply through pressure of time or workload, what have you, forget to ask for the order, so it's partly just human frailty, and learning, of course. A model that uses automatic inc

Public Safety committee  That issue has come up a number of times. It's an important issue. When a Canadian has been convicted abroad and, under the International Transfer of Offenders Act, is transferred back to Canada under sentence, then of course we know about the offence. It would be fairly straight

Public Safety committee  I would just add that obviously this is the type of crime that tends to be private, as opposed to being a public event. It's hard to ignore a bank robbery, which is, by definition, a public event. Dr. Hanson is engaged in some research on trying to devise a reliable way to esti

Public Safety committee  I would reiterate that no one disagrees with the overall objective--that's very clear--of safety and security for everyone. As with any issue, sometimes there are different paths to achieving that objective. At the officials level, it's fair to say that we look at many differen

Public Safety committee  Yes. He did that under contract for us.

Public Safety committee  In Canada, the model that was chosen by Parliament is one that restricts access to police, so it is different from the United States, where every state has a publicly available registry. As part of the research we do, of course, you look into why those decisions were made. I thin

Public Safety committee  I would just say that we do monitor the U.S. research very, very closely. They do extremely good research on their criminal justice programs. It's something we pay very close attention to in order to learn from it.

Public Safety committee  One of the reasons that some of the American registries have not been very effective is, of course, this issue of reliability of the data. I think that's why you hear a big emphasis on ensuring that we have comprehensive and reliable data. So many of the states report that they

Public Safety committee  The first offence is a summary conviction matter. In a moment, someone will turn to the reference of what the potential monetary and incarceral penalty is. On a second or subsequent offence, it's a hybrid. It could be prosecuted either summarily or on indictment and the maximum p