NDP bill that would forbid sex offenders from changing name unwise, unhelpful: advocates
CBC
A proposed bill that would bar convicted sex offenders from legally changing their name in Manitoba will not improve public safety and might even drive them away from the programs they need, restorative justice advocates say.
"This would mean then that we want to label and stigmatize people, and we want to keep them in that place for the rest of their lives. We want people to identify them by the name that they had whenever a particular thing was done so that they're identified as a sex offender," said Chris Cowie, executive director of Community Justice Initiatives.
Cowie says many believe such treatment acts as some sort of deterrent — "that it's a punishment that helps them to always know what they've done, and it'll stop them from doing it again," he said. "That's not true."
"Anything we do that further stigmatizes people like that increases the very types of offences that ostensibly we want to stamp out. That's just pure and simple. We increase the potential for those things to happen. This only exacerbates the problem."
On Thursday, Government Services Minister Lisa Naylor introduced The Change of Name Amendment Act at the legislature.
Bill 23 would require anyone who applies to change their name to include a certified criminal record check on top of the existing requirement for fingerprints.
If someone is flagged as having committed one of the yet-to-be-determined offences, their application won't be processed, Naylor said.
"When someone has survived sexual violence, they want to know that the perpetrator can't simply hide behind a new identity," Naylor told reporters Thursday. "This legislation makes Manitoba a more hostile environment for serious violent offenders."
Cowie and his team have worked with dozens of convicted sex offenders over the years. He says some have been in their programs for more than a decade, have created safety and accountability plans and are taking meaningful steps in their lives to ensure they never reoffend.
"When people have accepted accountability in that kind of way then I don't understand why we feel the need to continue to stigmatize them as though they did something yesterday and are going to do it again tomorrow," he said. "I think that that's problematic and doesn't contribute to a healthy and peaceful kind of society that we're in."
Cowie and other advocates question why the potential change is even necessary given the current guidelines that must be followed under the National Sex Offender Registry.
They say there are already checks and balances in place to ensure the safety of Canadians.
Canada already has a system in place for tracking sex offenders across the country.
The National Sex Offender Registry (NSOR) is a national registration system for sex offenders convicted of designated sex offences and ordered by the courts to report annually to police.