Justice committee  The answer is yes. Young offenders are treated, for the purposes of DNA data banking orders by courts, exactly as adults are, and they will be subject to the same designated offences if they're found guilty, as opposed to being convicted. You'll see the various language. But a yo

Justice committee  The purpose of the amendments is to permit, both domestically and internationally, information that links potential crimes together to be used for that purpose. Bill C-18 amended the legislation and changed it to “designated” offences. Previously, it was “criminal” offences. It's

Justice committee  Again, Canada has--

Justice committee  In answer to the question of what the motivator is for the international sharing of DNA profiles, it's simply public safety. It's recognized that Canada has been one of the actual prime movers to encourage international sharing of DNA at the G8 level during sessions there, recogn

Justice committee  It seems to me--and this is my understanding--that these categories were really created by the committee itself when Bill C-13 was being debated. The concern of the committee was that the data bank, the convicted offender index, was not receiving the volume of designated offenc

Justice committee  Well, I can tell you that in order for a sample to be taken from a convicted offender, there had to be a valid court order. If you have a case where...and I think it's a human factor. My explanation from talking to judges and prosecutors is that the system is complex. In other

Justice committee  I'm not sure that I can respond to that without knowing simply which of the--

Justice committee  You're talking about in Bill C-18?

Justice committee  My understanding is that we should be reflecting the intent of the original Bill C-13. It's simply a matter of reformatting it to ensure that we've got the intent properly.

Justice committee  In essence, my understanding of the conspiracy issue that Mr. Comartin raised is that there was an anomaly between what we could get a warrant for and what we could get a DNA data bank.... We had an exception. We couldn't have conspiracies. Conspiracies may be seen as a lesser of

Justice committee  It doesn't. The problem is that Bill C-13 has not been proclaimed with respect to the definitions of designated offences, which means that it can't be used until that is proclaimed. I understand the technical problems in the wording caused.... My justice department drafting col

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.