In the RCMP, I think we go back to what the registry's intended to do. Predicting which sex offender will recidivate and which will not is very difficult. We have seen cases of people who have been assessed as high risks and did not offend and cases of people who have been assessed as low risks and did go on to commit serious offences. So in regard to starting from a risk-based assessment, you're already treading some dangerous ground from a law enforcement perspective.
We are able to manage the numbers now. We've looked at the potential numbers in some of the provinces if, say, we had were automatic inclusion. We think it's important to have this populated with sex offenders and it would be of investigative value. It's a mistake, in our experience, and there is research that does bear this out, to assume that someone who has been convicted--and I'm going to use the quotation marks--of a “minor offence” is not at risk to reoffend.
I'm not sure what a “minor” sexual offence is to begin with, but we see through our experience that people are committing what some people call nuisance offences, like voyeurism, and they figure that, really, these are no-harm, no-foul types of offences. But we know from experience and from research that many rapists, and violent rapists, engage in voyeurism. It's part of a wide repertoire of deviant sexual behaviour.
I'm not suggesting that everybody who's convicted of voyeurism or engages in voyeurism is going to take that next step and become a hands-on sexual offender, but the reverse is true. We know that a lot of violent rapists do engage in some of these offences that appear less serious. From our perspective, it's very dangerous to assume that someone who's been convicted of a summary conviction offence or a minor sexual offence should be excluded from the registry.