Host: Under provincial law, sex offenders are placed on a registry and required to update their information annually, in some cases for life. Now, a Hamilton judge has ruled key provisions of that law are unconstitutional, but the Premier wants to go further and make parts of the registry public. Abigail Nubla is an employment lawyer and workplace investigator, and she joins me in studio. How are you doing?

Abigail Nubla: Good. How are you?

Host: I'm doing well. Before we begin, I just want to let our viewers know that we are going to be spending some time talking about a very sensitive topic, which is the sex offender registry. So we want to advise our viewers to take care of themselves while watching. All right. Before we get into the article that you wrote about sex offender registries, tell us why Ontario's registry is actually named Christopher's Law.

Abigail Nubla: Yeah. So Christopher's Law is named after an 11 year old boy named Christopher. It was implemented in 2001. And so Christopher was killed by a convicted sex offender. And so that's why the law is named after him. Essentially, Christopher's law requires convicted sex offenders. When they get released to report to police and give some basic information, like their employment, their name, their address, and depending on their crime, they have to do that for either ten years or the rest of their life. So it's Ontario's private system, private.

Host: So this is and who, who would have who would have this information.

Abigail Nubla: So the police would have that information. And it's essentially for them to be able to do investigations more easily, essentially.

Host: All right. As we know, the sex offender registry has made headlines over the last couple of months because the Premier announced plans that he wants to make parts of the sex offender registry public. We did reach out to the Ministry of the Solicitor General for comment, and they did provide us with this statement, and it reads, families deserve to know if dangerous criminals convicted of sexual crimes against children are living in their community. That is why, as part of the Keeping Criminals Behind Bars Act, our government made it clear that we will explore options to make certain information from the Ontario Sex Offender and Sex Trafficker Registry. Publicly accessible consultations are ongoing, and we are engaging directly with law enforcement partners, legal stakeholders and subject matter experts to develop a responsible and effective approach that increases transparency while maintaining public safety and investigative integrity. What are your thoughts on that?

Abigail Nubla: So there's a couple of things. When I hear that, first of all, they're saying the reason is public safety, but there's no real data to support that. Public registries increase public safety. And so that would be my first first instinct on that. And then as well, there's some potential negative side effects of a public registry as well, which we can get into further. But essentially, I mean, when you put someone on a public list and you tell everyone in their community and stigmatize them, it makes it really hard for someone to get a stable job, to find any sort of housing to get involved in their community at all. And those are all anchors to society. And when you take those anchors away, you don't actually increase safety. You might do the opposite because someone has less to lose when they don't have those things, tying them to society.

Host: Well, dig into a little bit of that. I do want to know, and I don't know if we have this information, but do we know what information the government wants to make public?

Abigail Nubla: No, we don't know yet. We know that they're going to make some of it public, or they want to make some of it public, but they haven't been clear about what parts they're going to do that with. Yeah.

Host: All right. So you looked at data on public sex offender registries and their effectiveness. What did you find?

Abigail Nubla: Yeah. So so basically, I mean, I think to start in the beginning and, and before I get into it, I want to reiterate again that sexual offences are a very serious crime. And by no means am I trying to minimize that or dispute that. The goal, I think, is reducing recidivism and and increasing public safety. So I think to understand kind of the whole picture, it's helpful to know that sexual offences already have a pretty low recidivism rate. So there was a study from the early 2000, a meta analysis, which basically looked at a whole bunch of different studies and saw that about 75% of sexual offenders did not re offend within 20 years of being released. So about 25% did. And then there's more recent data from 2022 that also shows that number has decreased to 7%. So we're not dealing with a group of people who are inevitably going to re offend. But I also don't want to minimize that 7% because it's a very serious crime and it means that it does happen. So then I think the question should be, would a public registry reduce that 7% even further? And there's no data to show that that's the case. So in the United States, there's a few jurisdictions which have implemented public registries, and there have been studies to look at whether they did reduce recidivism rates. And there was no statistically significant difference. So there's no data kind of showing that it does, or demonstrating that it does reduce recidivism rates for sexual offenders.

Host: Then with that, let's look on the other side. What measures are effective at lowering re offending rates.

Abigail Nubla: Yeah. So there's a couple of things. And I mean we know from the early 2000 to now, there has been a pretty significant decrease to the 7%. But there's not one thing that's caused that. A lot of the experts say it's really just a bunch of different factors working together. So in general, our criminology knowledge is grown a lot in the past two decades. So we just understand things better. We also understand therapies and specialized therapies and treatment programs better. So we've developed those things which can help people in an individualized kind of approach. And also, there are ways to use Ontario's private registry in in specialized ways as well, and individualized ways. So Ontario doesn't currently do this, but Manitoba has a system where there's a committee and and if a sex offender is being released and the police believe that they are potentially high risk to re offend, they can refer them to that committee. The committee will then look at a bunch of factors like what were the age of that offender's victims? What is their psychological history? Did they partake in any sort of treatment programs? And so they'll look at all that and they'll decide whether they believe the person is a high risk to re offend. And if they do, then there's a bunch of different individualized options they can take, like, for example, ongoing surveillance of the person and also notification requirements as well. So if they think that it's truly necessary to notify a community, they can do that all the way up to notifying all of Manitoba. But that is like the most drastic measure of notification that they would take. And there's a bunch of different lower levels before that.

Host: Okay, I want to switch gears a little bit here because I want to talk about a judge in Hamilton ruled that Ontario sex offender registry was unconstitutional. What makes it unconstitutional?

Abigail Nubla: Yeah. So so this ruling is is quite recent. Basically, the judge looked at two parts of Christopher's law and found that. So the first part is that if you commit a sex offence, you are automatically on the registry. And the second part is that if you get convicted of multiple sex offences, you are on that registry for life. So he found both of those parts to be over broad and too general, basically painting everyone with a broad brush, not taking into consideration the individual circumstances of particular people, and treating low and high risk offenders the same way.

Host: Okay. Premier Ford said that he would use the notwithstanding clause to make sure that the changes he plans can't be overturned via a charter challenge. What do you think of that?

Abigail Nubla: Yeah, so I think given the fact that there's no data to support really that public registries reduce recidivism rates, that using the notwithstanding clause would be, well, it's not needed and would also be like quite a drastic approach considering it would result in a charter violation. That's, that's the purpose for using the notwithstanding clause. And like I alluded to before, I think there's other other things we can do better that that wouldn't require the notwithstanding clause and that wouldn't have some of the drawbacks of a public registry, which, you know, do separate and stigmatize people from society and prevent reintegration.

Host: What's the fear? You talked a little bit about it of having a public registry. Are we going to see people sort of take the law into their own hands?

Abigail Nubla: It's interesting you say that because Manitoba on their website, where they talk about their committee, they have in big, bold letters, the purpose of any notification is not for public vigilantism. So it is a concern, of course, that has clearly been raised in that province, that does sometimes do notifications. So I think that it's not something we can ever count out. I think that more realistically, probably the what will more commonly happen is people will struggle to find jobs, struggle to find housing, and then that will kind of push them to a place where maybe they have to re offend and maybe they have to steal something or get into illicit substances, and it pushes them to a place where, where they have, you know, been forced to kind of do those other things that they might not have had to do if they had a stable income and had community ties.

Host: I have to imagine there are viewers and listeners right now who are probably having a hard time holding space for people and having sympathy. And I will admit myself too. Yeah. For, for a group of people when we talk about sex offenders and I'm hoping you can help us understand, what do you hope to contribute to the public's understanding on this issue?

Abigail Nubla: Yeah. So I think reiterating, reiterating again, that, you know, this is not to minimize the seriousness of a sexual offence. I have the goal of reducing recidivism and increasing public safety, just like the government does. I just think that we have different perspectives on how we go about that. And if the government is is saying that a public registry would increase safety, I think it's fair to challenge that if there's no real data to back that up, because if that is really the goal, we want to do the things that will actually result in safety and reduce recidivism.

Host: Abigail, we are going to leave it there. I really appreciate your time and your insights on this one. Thank you so much.

Abigail Nubla: Thank you so much.