When Christopher Stephenson was a young boy—before he was kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered by a notorious pedophile—his father would often tuck him into bed with a classic fairy tale: The Emperor’s New Clothes. A well-known children’s book, it tells the story of a pompous but gullible monarch who mistakenly hires two swindlers to revamp his kingly wardrobe. The result? The con men convince the emperor that they have discovered a gorgeous—but invisible—new material, and then promptly parade him around town in his latest “clothes.”
In Ottawa yesterday, as Christopher’s dad testified in front of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, he used that fictional fable to illustrate a very real point. “Mr. Chair, committee members,” said Jim Stephenson, sitting beside his wife, Anna. “In its present form, the [national sex offender registry] has no clothes, either. It is dysfunctional, and fails to properly protect Canadians from becoming victims.”
Sadly, Jim Stephenson is hardly the first person to criticize the fairy tale state of our sex-offender registry. The database has been described as everything from “a national embarrassment” to something straight out of a “Monty Python skit,” and a series of Maclean’s investigations uncovered a horribly broken system crippled by weak legislation, archaic technology and an utter lack of political will. But for the first time since the database was launched in 2004—and more than two years after the law mandated a Parliamentary review—MPs are finally taking a close look at the litany of problems plaguing the registry.
For two days (four hours in all) the Public Safety Committee heard from a variety of expert witnesses, from bureaucrats to police officers to privacy advocates. There was news (in five years, the registry has not solved a single crime). There was honesty (some offenders are “falling through the cracks,” said a senior RCMP officer). And, of course, there was the inevitable politicking (Conservative ministers repeatedly lamented the fact that Jean Chrétien’s Liberals didn’t foresee all these obvious problems when they first introduced the registry). However, it was Brydie Bethell, representing the Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers, who summed it up best. “This is not an easy issue,” she said. “This issue strikes at the core of our hearts, as human beings and as parents.”
Peter Van Loan, the Public Safety Minister, assured reporters this week that Stephen Harper’s government is already “consulting” with stakeholders and considering amendments that would toughen up the registry. (Of course, his predecessor, Stockwell Day, said the exact same thing—and nothing happened). Adding to the endless consultations, the parliamentary committee must now prepare yet another report for the government, including a series of specific recommendations. Until then, here are five essential things that they must consider:
1) HOW WE GOT HERE
Christopher Stephenson was 11 years old when Joseph Fredericks, a convicted child molester with a heinous criminal record, abducted the young boy from a Brampton, Ont., shopping mall on Father’s Day weekend, 1988. Fredericks kept Christopher alive for 36 hours and assaulted him repeatedly before slitting his throat and dumping his body. A coroner’s jury later concluded that if police had access to an electronic registry of known sex offenders living in the neighbourhood, detectives might have knocked on Fredericks’ door while the boy was still alive. As Jim Stephenson testified today: “There would have been a very definite, different outcome. You talk about time being of the essence in an investigation like that? Police were on the scene within about three minutes of Christopher’s abduction. They responded very quickly, but did not have much information to go on. They had no information on sex offenders who were living in the community.”
Ontario, under then-Premier Mike Harris, launched a provincial sex offender registry in April 2001 (eight years ago this week). It’s called Christopher’s Law, in honour of Jim and Anna’s son. Anyone in the province convicted of a sex offence is automatically added to the database, and among the “state-of-the-art” features is a geo-mapping function that can pinpoint the names and addresses of every registered rapist and pedophile who lives near a crime scene. Harris offered Ontario’s software to the Chrétien government free of charge, but for a long time, the feds weren’t interested. And when Ottawa—under increasing pressure from provincial governments—finally did decide to build a nationwide sex offender registry, they didn’t want Ontario’s help. Instead, the federal Liberals ordered the RCMP to build a completely new system from scratch. Many of the current shortcomings can be traced back to that single decision.
