I think my previous answer was that there is a risk that it would be limiting. If the wording was as proposed, “using the Internet or other digital network specified by the court”, then the expectation would be that the court would specify what other networks are not included in the Internet.
The information I've provided to the committee.... I'm not a technical person, but my understanding of the Internet is that it includes, for example, the land area networks, the LANs. It includes the example I gave before, the one about the bulletin boards and all of that. But the technical people say that technically that is not included in the Internet per se, so that's why the other language....
The question really is, what is the intention? What do we catch here? One is that you want to make sure that the court turns its mind to considering the need for such a condition. Two, the court should turn its mind to what conditions, what parameters, should be imposed along with that condition. The way it's worded now, I would suggest that the court would have ample opportunity to make it as specific, as broad, or as narrow as is appropriate in the circumstances.
Would the proposal to add “specified by the court” limit that? As I said, the only risk that occurs to me is that if an individual judge did not turn his or her mind to it and perhaps didn't realize that those other technical networks that don't run on a TCP, on that protocol, may not be considered to be part of the Internet that we talk about commonly. I think that at the end of the day, either way, a sentence in court is going to be very much informed by the submissions made to the court by the crown and the defence: what's appropriate in this circumstance and what's the intention?
We see this right now. Courts do this right now as part of sentencing on probation orders, without any of these directions, because they tailor it. If it goes too broadly, there would be a concern about charter risk. If they make the condition overly broad, going beyond what is needed to safeguard the community against sexual reoffending by this offender, there could be a risk. Courts are very mindful of that.