Fear isn’t evidence

Late last year, Ontario Premier Doug Ford declared he’d use the notwithstanding clause “in a heartbeat” to follow through on his plan to make parts of the province's sex offender registry public should it be found unconstitutional. 

“We’re probably going to get shot down from the courts again, but I’ll use every single tool to make sure we protect the victims over the sex offenders. It’s a no-brainer,” Ford said. 

This is one component of the premier’s attempt to get “tough on crime” with the new Keeping Criminals Behind Bars Act. The provincial government says the legislation is aimed at strengthening community safety and making sure dangerous people are held accountable. 

But if the goal of the sex offence-related restrictions is community safety, then the measure that matters is not outrage or reassurance — it’s recidivism. 

Evidence shows that social stability, not increased public stigma, reduces reoffending. In fact, some data have shown that public registries can increase the risk of reoffending.

Fear isn’t evidence 

Sexual offences evoke understandable fear. However, people convicted of sexual offences reoffend at lower rates than the public assumes, and less often than many other categories of offenders.

Long-term follow-up studies consistently show that most people convicted of sexual offences do not reoffend. An older meta-analysis found that roughly three-quarters of sexual offenders had not committed a new sexual offence after a 20-year follow-up. 

More recent Canadian data places sexual recidivism at approximately seven per cent, a decline often attributed to improved risk assessment, supervision, and treatment.

Public sex offender registries have not been shown to reduce these already low rates further. 

A comprehensive New Jersey study found no significant reduction in sexual recidivism rates or first-time offence rates after a public registry was introduced. When South Carolina put its registry online in 1999, researchers similarly observed no further crime reduction in the six years that followed. And when Washington State compared sex offenders released before and after its community notification law, there was no statistically significant difference in re-arrest rates for sex crimes. 

Another study actually found that “[w]hile the public views registries as necessary for community safety, […] they often perpetuated misconceptions, such as the belief that all offenders are irredeemable and highly likely to reoffend, further marginalizing individuals and limiting their access to critical resources like housing and employment.”

Ford’s comments feed those misconceptions. 

“These child pornography people? Throw them in jail. Throw away the key. They can rot in there,” he said.

“Nothing’s more important to protect our communities, to protect them from people like these. I can’t even put the word out there. They’re a bunch of diddlers. I can’t stand them. They make me sick.”

The reality is that public registries don’t just fail to reduce recidivism rates; they may actually increase them. That’s because public registries are not neutral information tools. They alter where people can live, whether they can find work, and whether they can participate in ordinary community life. These are not side effects. They are predictable consequences of public exposure.

Employment, housing, family connections, and community ties serve as informal controls against recidivism. When people have something at stake, they are less likely to reoffend. Public registries work against these stabilizing forces. 

Criminal records already operate as blunt instruments, often acting as proxies for race, disability, and poverty. Ontario’s Human Rights Code currently protects from discrimination based on “record of offences” in employment, but that protection is limited to those who have received a pardon. So the Code will offer no protection to individuals on a public registry. 

If reintegration reduces recidivism, policies that undermine it should give us pause.

Instead of an indiscriminate public registry, experts advocate for individualized risk assessments and long-term management of those who are truly high-risk offenders. This targeted approach has been credited with driving the decline in recidivism rates of sexual offenders. 

Ontario already has tools for this. Under Christopher's Law, which created the province’s non-public sex offender registry in 2000, police and probation officers monitor offenders and can alert specific community members if someone poses an imminent threat. 

Manitoba also uses a community review committee to decide on targeted notifications for high-risk cases. This ensures that those who need watching are watched, without destroying the privacy and prospects of those who don’t. 

None of this minimizes the harm of sexual violence. But it does challenge the assumption that ever-expanding restrictions automatically reduce risk. When baseline reoffending rates are already low, interventions that destabilize people’s lives will do more harm than good.

A better question

The real question raised by Ford’s proposal is not whether sexual offences are serious. They are. It’s whether Ontario is willing to pursue policies that make communities safer, even when they are politically inconvenient.

If destabilizing people increases the risk of harm, then a public registry is not a protective measure. It’s performative. 

Public sex offender registries have existed for some time in other jurisdictions. If they made us safer, the evidence would show it by now.