Someone would have to talk to a lawyer to find out if it is legal and maybe challange it under Consitutional Rights and if it's not legal then Harper may just be trying to use it for the media because the next election is around the corner. Harper will do a lot of small things in the future leading up to the election to add to his faux-resume of successes and this registry appeals to the fears of people.
I also can see the point in the registry but who are people more afraid of......a sex offender....or....someone with a long violent record who can go off at any given moment?
I always get a good laugh that there seems to be some incessant need for comparing Liberals to Conservatives or any other party to another. I've for the most part always judged people by who they are as an individual and not by political affiliation. At times however the leader of the party and how he controls his people does put everyone in the party in the same boat as him because they have become sheep. This is the reason I have always had and always will have a deep dislike (putting it mildly) for Harper.
However, with regards to the registry........when Martin introduced the registry it was not accessible to the public. Now under Harper offenders are customarily exposed in the media and at times their photos even shown. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? For me it's a toss-up because I feel that people should know who is in their neighborhood (when it comes to true deranged offenders), but on the other side of the coin it can lead to vigilantism and at times it can lead to mistaken identity which brings up a whole different set of problems and crimes.
Also if we are to be true human beings with open minds we have to look at the circumstances of the offence that would have lead someone to become part of the registry. The 'details' are often not mentioned in the media. As an example someone getting out of jail or prison from a past offence where he was 17 or 18 and fell in love with a 14 year old girl. At the time that could have been put through the courts as an offence and he would have ended up on the registry for life. The problem is in the minds of young people love surpasses laws. Even Romeo and Juliet, the iconic story of love, Juliet was just short of her 14th birthday and although Romeo's age was not specifically mentioned Shakespeare aficionados consider his age to have been around 21. Lady Capulet herself, Juliets mother, was married at around age 12.
I knew of a fellow in my own area who had been charged with a sex crime and I checked him and his story out. Turned out it was back in the early 1980's and he was at a party, a bit drunk and had a one time, one night 'relationship' with a young girl who looked for all purposes to be about 18 when she was in fact......14. He was nearly 18 at the time. It was a one time HUGE mistake on his part and he has a clean record ever since, but, he's still in the registry.
So is the registry a good thing? I think in some cases yes, especially with long term offenders and in other cases maybe not. But either way.......it has nothing to do with political affiliations. The bottom line is.........you never know who is out there......registry or not. Look at the three highschool football players in the US charge with assaulting a young woman. Boys who are/were the pillars of the school, heroes on the football field and admired their local society and one of them .......is father is a local cop!
Although we did want girls if we had had children it may have been a good thing we didn't because they would have either been taking martial arts are target shooting from age 1 or in a nunnery till they were 25 and anyone who did harm them couldn't have found a hole deep enough on the planet to hide in.
I agree with you generally on what you said in your post, however the only reason I pointed out the comparing Liberals and Conservatives is in your post you said ......."Paul Martin (LIBERAL) government". Puck had only mentioned Harper and made no mention of Conservatives. If you hadn't have said (LIBERAL) I wouldn't have mentioned a thing about it.
In reality though, chances are the idea was not even made by a leader but more by their political strategists who decide what is good for a government to do at any specific time for specific reasons.
Harper's media attention recently is purely political as the election draws closer and closer and he's ..........worried. He's just adding to his list of "I did this and that" when as you pointed out it was actually started by Martin. There should be rules and consequences for political plagiarism.
