Justice committee  Thank you. It may be useful to simply go back to the fact that the power to share DNA profiles internationally, through the national DNA data bank, is now in the legislation of the DNA Identification Act. It provides that the data bank can, on receiving a request from a foreign

Justice committee  Thank you, Minister. I should clarify that there are two aspects to international DNA exchanges. One is at the request of Canadian law enforcement agencies, who would ask that the crime scene DNA profile they've derived, and for which they have no suspect or answer, would be sen

Justice committee  My only comment would be that it would be illegal under the DNA Identification Act for the officials in the DNA data bank to send or communicate information from the data bank except as permitted by the DNA Identification Act, and those cases are very restricted, so that the only

Justice committee  I can confirm that all they are permitted to send abroad is the DNA profile, not the sample. The sample is separated and kept and stored, and can only be reused under very exceptional circumstances, where new technology is required to analyze those profiles under a new system.

Justice committee  Thank you, Mr. Hanger. I would agree with the assertion that Mr. Thompson put forward, that it is a complicated process to determine what is or is not a designated offence. The courts have a problem determining that, because we do have a number of what we call non-designated off

Justice committee  Thank you, Ms. Jennings. The answer is that the RCMP commissioner will be responsible for the transmission of the information that it has in the DNA data bank that it is allowed to transmit, so that the commissioner's delegates are the appropriate people to answer those question

Justice committee  I would think that the witnesses here are capable of doing that.

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  I think I would probably be the person you would address those questions to.

Justice committee  I'll try my best. Your first question is about the wisdom of allowing this to take place. In essence what happened in Bill C-25--or it's Bill C-13 now--chapter 25 of the Statutes of Canada 2005, was to permit the domestic sharing of information concerning what we call a moderate

Justice committee  I may be able to help on this particular point. My understanding is that the expansion is to allow, in the retroactive scheme, the addition of conspiracy to commit murder to the list, for the purposes of the DNA data banking regime and the warrant scheme. Expanding this beyond

Justice committee  I'll do my best. When Bill C-13 first arrived, its purpose was really to deal with the problem of what we call non-designated offences being sent in by courts. Those offences were kept in the data bank unanalyzed, but undestroyed, because we had a valid court order. But on the

Justice committee  That's one of the Bill C-18 changes, so it changes that. Another change, which the RCMP asked for, was to deal with this issue of moderate match reporting, which it didn't have the authority to do under the DNA Identification Act as it was written prior to Bill C-13.

Justice committee  Yes, it did. It changed it for the domestic legislation, but then it tightened it up for the international. So it prohibited international sharing of that insofar as it specifically limited what could be sent to being strictly confirmation of whether we had a match, rather than t

Justice committee  That's right. And, in fact, it was.