RCMP vulnerabile sector screening application for males will almost always result in requiring to submit fingerprints to the RCMP.
Recently for a volunteer position I was asked to provide a Vulnerable Sector Screening (VSS) application, or Vulnerable Sector Police Reference Checks (VSPRC), done by the Toronto Police. A long 8 weeks later a letter arrived stating that the RCMP requires my fingerprints due to a match of my gender and date of birth to the RCMP pardoned sex offenders registry.
I know most sex offenders are male, as am I, but so what? A call to Toronto Police revealed that I have no Toronto criminal record and no hits on the RCMP database, which I knew. So what is going on?
The VSS application to the RCMP database only matches on sex and date of birth, and not name, SIN, or any other info. There are, as of 2010,
The National Parole Board has granted more than 400,000 pardons since 1970. source
Between 1970 and 2010 there are 40 years, or 40*365 = 14,600 days. With 400,000 pardons for 14,600 days, there are, on average 27.4 pardoned sex offenders, almost all guys, for each day of the 40 years. If someone can be a sex offender starting age 17, if there are 27 guys per day, this might cover up to 54 years old. It is no wonder that, if you apply for the VSS and you are male, you have an extremely good chance of the need to submit your fingerprints to the RCMP. As an additional 9 years has passed since 2010 and no new days of the year have been added, these probabilities will only grow in the future.
This is very discriminatory. Apparently teacher Otto Schmidt also believes this procedure is discriminatory.
Such a discriminatory practice will surely reduce the number of male volunteers in Canadian society. I do know that I am very put off by this discriminatory practice. These security checks are only valid for the date searched, with no guarantee that status will not change the next day. If you reapply, after a few years, you will need to redo your fingerprints.
RCMP vulnerabile sector screening application for males will almost always result in requiring to submit fingerprints to the RCMP.
I had no problem giving fingerprints to get secret clearance for Canada, US and Vietnam because I worked for a defence contractor. But there, women had the same duty to print. This VSC protocol is archaic, Draconian, discriminatory, demeaning, detrimental, daffy. No defensible basis in law, sociology, criminology, forensics, data science or statistics. Otto is a smart guy. Whoever dreamed up the program could not possibly qualify for Otto’s advanced courses. Probably highly skilled in astrology, Tarot and phrenology.
Of course not all pardons qualify for VSC so although your 27 per day might be accurate in total it is much lower for sex offences. My calculations suggest that each and every pardoned sex offender blindly affects the self-worth of between 680 and 844 law-abiding Canadian men. Most legal proceeding require notification of any party that could be affected by a decision. 700 men ought to have been notified of the guy’s hearing for pardon and given standing to object. There were more than 14,000 such pardons on record as of 2012. About 40:1 ratio of men to women required to print. My napkin estimate is that between 4.5 and 9.5 million Canadian males will ping a match in the database. If everyone wanted to volunteer, that could be 20 million wasted work hours plus up to $200,000,000 just in process fees. And Otto is right not to trust that the innocent prints are not misdirected by all involved in the process. Makes zero sense.