A timeline of Canada’s National Sex Offender Registry. The concept was flawed from the beginning—and it’s only gotten worse
Father’s Day, 1988 — Joseph Fredericks, a paroled pedophile with a lengthy criminal record, confesses to police in Brampton, Ont., that he abducted, molested and murdered 11-year-old Christopher Stephenson. He personally leads detectives to the wooded area where he dumped the boy’s body. Fredericks pleads guilty to first-degree murder, and is later stabbed to death by a fellow inmate at Kingston Penitentiary.
January 1993 — A coroner’s inquest into Christopher’s case results in 71 sweeping recommendations. Number 44 urges the federal government to create an electronic registry of convicted, high-risk sex offenders that records current addresses, telephone numbers and other descriptive material. The coroner’s jury concluded that if a registry existed the day Christopher was kidnapped, police would have been able to generate an instant list of suspects living in the neighbourhood. Maybe those detectives would have knocked on Fredericks’ door while the boy was still alive.
1999 — Six years after the inquest, Ottawa is no closer to creating a national sex offender registry. But Ontario is. The Mike Harris government—with assistance from Christopher’s parents, Jim and Anna—begin crafting legislation for a provincial sex offender registry.
April 23, 2001 — “Christopher’s Law” is officially enacted, making Ontario the first jurisdiction in Canada to boast a sex offender registry. Anyone convicted of a designated offence—from child pornography to molestation—is automatically added to the system. They must check in with police every year and every time they move. Harris is so impressed with the database that he offers the software free of charge to his federal counterparts. Jean Chrétien’s Liberals don’t appear interested, so Harris shifts the offer to his fellow premiers. “We’ll provide whatever expertise and advice the other provinces require, both at a ministerial level and at the official level in legislation and the regulations as well as our software,” Harris promises.
September 11, 2001 — Federal Solicitor-General Lawrence MacAulay, under increasing pressure to beat the provinces to the punch, announces a $2-million plan to overhaul CPIC, the main police computer that contains everyone’s criminal record, and is available in all police cruisers across the country. Insisting that CPIC is “already a reliable and proven” sex offender registry, MacAulay says the upgrades will allow police to search for sex offenders based on location—but it won’t require those offenders to keep their contact information up to date. Provincial justice ministers are so unimpressed with the plan that they hold their own press conference later that morning. It was quickly overshadowed by the terrorist attacks unfolding in New York and Washington.
Fall 2001 — Terrorism is at the top of the federal agenda, but a few weeks after 9/11, MacAulay agrees to meet Jim and Anna Stephenson, who are still lobbying hard for a national sex offender registry. “There was some shouting and screaming, but he gave us an hour and a half of his time,” Jim recalls. “However, he stated categorically that his government was opposed to a sex offender registry and he would have no part of it.” The pressure didn’t stop, though. It soon becomes clear that if the feds don’t build a nationwide registry, the provinces will create their own.
February 13, 2002 — At a meeting of provincial and federal justice officials in Moncton, N.B., MacAulay shocks the crowd with an unexpected announcement: the feds have decided to build a national sex offender registry after all.
December 11, 2002 — Bill C-23 is tabled in the House. Wayne Easter, now the Solicitor-General, says “the registry will become another tool in our toolbox for protecting Canadians, particularly our children, from sexual predators.” The feds have no intention of copying Ontario’s program. Ottawa wants to create a completely distinct registry—in more ways than one.
January 2004 — The national registry is still not a reality. The bill died in 2003 when Parliament prorogued, but was reintroduced a year later. The federal Justice Department wrote the legislation, seeking advice from the Federal/Provincial/Territorial High Risk Sex Offenders Working Group, which includes representatives from all provinces and territories. The Mounties feel shut out of the process. The RCMP’s Behavioural Sciences Branch has been tasked to build and maintain the registry, yet those same officers have little say in the actual legislation. “This was political, and for whatever reason, there wasn’t a whole lot of consultation with the police at the time,” says Glenn Woods, a retired RCMP superintendent who helped build the system.
December 15, 2004 — The Sex Offender Information Registration Act (SOIRA) becomes law (it was supposed to come into force on October 1, but the official unveiling had to be postponed by 10 weeks because the RCMP still wasn’t finished building the database). The new registry is not completely retroactive. Everyone listed on the Ontario registry, and anyone else currently serving a sentence for a sex crime, will be added to the list. But countless other known criminals whose sex crimes sentences have already expired—including notorious pedophile Peter Whitmore—will not be forced to register.
Winter 2005 — RCMP officers encounter another unforeseen hiccup. Most offenders ordered onto the registry are in jail and do not have to report until they are released. However, in a policy stance that defies logic, the Correctional Service of Canada refuses to tell registry staff when those offenders are set free. The information is available on CPIC, and another internal system known as InfoPol, but the legislation that created the registry strictly prohibits “data matching.” Which means the RCMP cannot connect the database to any other police computer. When the Mounties ask the federal corrections department to provide the information directly to them, they refuse. To this day, that is still the case.
May 4, 2005 — An offender in Alberta is convicted of failing to comply with the registry—the first-ever non-compliance conviction. He was fined $1,000.
Summer 2005 — The RCMP and the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) develop an electronic interface in order to ensure the national registry and the provincial version can share information. That way, if a person in Ontario is listed on both registries, the OPP won’t have to type the information into both databases. The interface, which goes live in September 2005, is a disaster. Data for 4,765 offenders was extracted from the Ontario registry and sent to the national. Of those, 2,141files were accepted and entered, but another 55% “were rejected for various reasons.” As the RCMP later wrote, the interface was constantly “crippled” by technical glitches. Files were duplicated. Some were missing crucial information. In some cases, the OPP—unable to pinpoint an offence date for hundreds of offenders—decided to enter Jan. 1, 1911 instead.
November 2005 — The RCMP unit that oversees the national sex offender registry issues a quarterly report. It includes a list of “Current Challenges.”
January 23, 2006 — Stephen Harper’s Conservatives win the federal election, campaigning on a platform that includes a vague promise to “register all convicted sex offenders.” A month later, Melissa Martineau, then the database manager, writes a report urging the Mounties to scrap the Ontario/national interface and concentrate on improving the registry’s technical capabilities.
“The RCMP stands to be embarrassed if the NSOR database continues to have only limited functionality,” she wrote. “With the current resources dedicated to the NSOR database, it is not possible to maintain the interface and further develop the database in a timely fashion…As the NSOR is a priority on the new Federal government’s agenda, it would be beneficial to the RCMP to develop the NSOR database to the point of full functionality and be ready for potential changes or enhancements.”
Insp. Art Crockett, the officer in charge of the registry at the time, writes his own briefing note to superiors, urging them to scrap the interface. “Although we state that the NSOR-D was implemented in 2004, there are those who would suggest that the Registry cannot be deemed as being rolled out as a completed system until the data can be collected, analyzed, searched and retrieved with logical and informative system generated reports. It was our intention to have many of these functions in operation by the end of the first year, however, this is not the case and much of the delay can be directly attributed to the work that has needed to go into the building of the NSOR/OSOR interface.”
He continues: “The RCMP is accountable to each of the Provinces and Territories for the development of this system. For some time now the Provincial representatives from outside Ontario have been expressing signs of displeasure on what appears to be a complete devotion to one Province at the expense of all others who are waiting in the cue for technical attention to issues they are facing.” The RCMP eventually pulls the plug on the interface.
April 2006 — The national registry centre issues another quarterly report, saying they are “approximately six months behind in our development schedule” because of problems with the interface. The list of “Current Challenges” remains the same as November 2005:
June 2006 — Jim Coflin, a former bureaucrat and now independent consultant, submits a report to the feds. He was hired by Ottawa to conduct an “implementation evaluation” of the registry. His report is not an assessment of the legislation itself, but a progress report of sorts. Still, his final report warns the government about a number of inherent problems with the registry:
The Mounties are provided with a draft copy of Coflin’s report, and submit their own written rebuttal. It is blunt, to say the least. The RCMP is most disappointed that the report “is not an evaluation of the effectiveness of the legislation,” which they have considered flawed since the beginning.
“The largest impact on the implementation of SOIRA was the legislation itself,” the RCMP wrote. “The report repeatedly identifies a number of perceived shortcomings within the operationalization of the National Sex Offender Registry, including the lack of flagging or alerts to front-end users with respect to offender non-compliance. The lack of such administrative tools can only be explained by the restrictions placed upon the ability to collect and register required administrative information under the Act.”
Summer 2006 — As Coflin’s report makes the rounds in Ottawa, the justice department continues to work on another piece of legislation: Bill S-3. The law will ensure that Canadian soldiers court-martialled for sex crimes are added to the registry, but it will also include some administrative amendments meant to remedy some of the RCMP’s longstanding complaints. But as far as the Mounties are concerned, the proposed law falls woefully short.
In fact, the RCMP is so unimpressed with justice department bureaucrats that officers craft their own list of suggestions for the FPT High Risk Offenders Working Group. Obtained by Maclean’s, the document doesn’t mince words—and is a reality check for anyone who might still believe that the national sex offender registry is a high-tech success.
Bill S-3 is now in effect. It corrected none of the RCMP’s major concerns.
July/August 2006 — As the Mounties plead for change behind closed doors, Peter Whitmore strikes again. A repeat pedophile with a long list of repugnant crimes, Whitmore kidnaps and sexually assaults two young boys before being cornered by police at an abandoned farmhouse in rural Saskatchewan. The registry doesn’t deserve all the blame for what happened to those boys (Whitmore was under strict police supervision, but when that court order expired, nobody seemed in any hurry to renew it). However, the Mounties seized the opportunity to warn Stockwell Day, Harper’s new Public Safety Minister, just how dysfunctional the registry is.
“There are a number of weaknesses and gaps in SOIRA [the Sex Offender Information Registration Act] that diminish the effectiveness and utility of the [registry],” reads one confidential memo, sent to Day on August 11, 2006. “The recent media attention, including criticism of the NSOR, provides an opportunity for the government to review the legislation and take the necessary steps to strengthen it before an incident occurs that highlights one or more of the concerns raised.”
The memo continues: “The implementation of SOIRA and the ongoing operation of the NSOR-D falls to the law enforcement community, and principally to the RCMP. In spite of the RCMP’s responsibility, the RCMP was provided with limited opportunity for input/involvement in development of the original legislation or the amendment process that followed. The RCMP’s exclusion from the legislative amendment process presents significant challenges for an agency striving to meet the high expectations Canadians have for the NSOR.”
The memo recommends “an immediate review of SOIRA,” and that the RCMP “play a more significant role in the legislative amendment process.” The note also includes a detailed chart entitled: “Restrictions to Proper Database and Program Management.” Among the items listed on the chart:
More than a year later, the federal government has done nothing to address the RCMP’s concerns.