Public Safety committee  I haven't seen the study, so I'm in a sort of vacuum from the standpoint of seeing exactly what eliminating the prime suspect means. I gave an example in which I said that even in a case where the database doesn't show a link, but where they have this other great evidence against

Public Safety committee  Again, on proportionality, murder investigations are obviously costly, and there is great utility in that. But I come back to diminishing returns. What value added do you get by expanding it to dangerous drivers who cause bodily harm? Again, I'll look to the research done in the

Public Safety committee  We share the same position as the Privacy Commissioner in terms of not expanding it further. And your example of the “do not call” list is good. But again, we are seeing this in the U.S. experience. Originally it was built as a criminal database, and then a state legislature sai

Public Safety committee  Well, it sounds like a TV show episode, what you're mentioning, but in reality it has happened. As we've heard, criminals are very smart. They're always trying to stay one step ahead of the law. There have been cases in the U.S. where, for instance, some criminal will provide h

Public Safety committee  Yes, and I can't argue with that. I can see how that happens.

Public Safety committee  First of all, I don't know if I'd ever advise a client to do this that early in the investigation. Leaving that aside, let's go down the hypothetical road that you do get to that point that, yes, you probably would get your own independent expert as well. The CFS in Toronto is

Public Safety committee  Well, statistics, I'm not sure what that would mean. On a practical level, as Mr. Harris mentioned, it really comes down to your client providing a sample and it is cleared from whatever was left at the crime scene. Just as other wrongful convictions have been cleared in this cou

Public Safety committee  The British mistake, as it's called, and it's a good example, is where they had a match at six from the database and they went to arrest the individual—they were all ready to take him to trial—but when they got there he turned out to have Parkinson's disease, he's in a wheelchair

Public Safety committee  It's a bit of a combination of both the science being not able to test the whole DNA strand, and that's why...because 99.9% of all our DNA is the same, it's only that 0.1% that differentiates us all. And on the strand they look at—and you've probably had this presented by other s

Public Safety committee  In the U.S. there's a lot more movement in terms of calling experts on databases. I haven't seen it in Canada yet, but again, as more evidence comes out from the U.S., I'm sure those challenges will come. DNA in a case really is fact-based. Depending on what the issue is, someti

Public Safety committee  I think you know my view.

Public Safety committee  Speaking about the upon-arrest issue, this isn't a new issue before Parliament. When this whole scheme was first developed, there was a big topic that was for obvious reasons on the table as well. And if you recall, there were opinions gathered from three former chief justices of

Public Safety committee  The flip side is the comment I made that the more you increase it, the greater the chances of false positives and false matches. And this isn't science fiction. You're seeing a new wave of cases in the States and challenges coming to databases. They want to get their independent

Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  How?