A private member’s bill that proposes changes to the Criminal Code of Canada and the Sex Offender Information Registration Act has been introduced in Parliament and has the family of two Alberta murder victims calling for lawmakers to support it.
“Noah’s Law,” formally known as Bill C-336, was introduced in both the House of Commons and the Senate this week as a joint bill by Conservative MP Gerald Soroka and Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu.
The bill is named after 16-month-old Noah McConnell, who was murdered in Hinton, Alta., in September 2021. The boy’s mother, 24-year-old Mchale Busch was sexually assaulted and also killed inside their apartment building.
Robert Major, Busch’s next-door neighbour, pleaded guilty in May to two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of the young mom and toddler.
In November 2022, he received an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.
Cody McConnell, who was engaged to Busch, has been pushing for laws to be changed on behalf of his fiancée and child, starting with a grassroots movement and petition for change.
Parole Board of Canada documents show Major, a registered sex offender, was sentenced to almost four years for an offence in 2012, in which he took a toddler from a babysitter’s care for an unsupervised walk and sexually assaulted the child.
Edmonton police later issued a warning about Major being released into the community, saying they believed there was a chance he could harm women and children.
At a news conference on Tuesday, McConnell said the justice system failed his family by not letting them know a convicted sex offender — who Alberta Justice says has a criminal record dating back to the early 1990s and who has been convicted of sex crimes — lived in their apartment building.
McConnell said that if he had known Major’s history, he never would have moved in with his family to the Hinton apartment.
“Mchale and Noah had their voices violently silenced,” McConnell said Tuesday. “We respectfully ask you to be their voices and seek passage of the bill.”
If passed into law, Bill C-336 would, in certain cases, extend the duration of registration for sex offenders to 30 years and require the follow-up of mandatory therapy programs if a sex offender wants to be removed from the registry. It also calls for increased visits to registration centres and would make address change notifications mandatory.
It would, in some cases, extend the period of time someone convicted of a sex offence must remain on the registry.
Some criminal law experts have said it is not clear yet if the private member’s bill is constitutional.
Sexual offender registries, both provincial and federal, are often the subject of constitutional challenges, according to criminal defence lawyer Ari Goldkind.
“There’s a balance between the rights of the offender once they are trying to be reintegrated to society, and the average member of the public to know that somebody is thought to be a high risk that could be living near them.”
Goldkind said in many cases Bill C-336 would strengthen laws already in place and spoke about how he sees the bill’s intent.
“Right now we live in a society that tips the balance in favour of the offender,” he said. “Noah’s Law is trying to balance those rights a little bit more to give more notice to unsuspecting people that there is a very high-risk person that may be their next-door neighbour.
“If the government isn’t seeking to lock them up forever or have them monitored for 10 years of intense supervision in the community, there’s a small subset of people that fall through the cracks.”
Goldkind added the bill aims to indirectly free up justice resources by changing how offenders like Major are dealt with.
“If we focused on that person, we will be opening up more real-time resources for police and Crown attorney offices so we don’t end up with more McConnell-like victims,” he said.
“That’s who the system is trying to protect and clearly failed.”
The private member’s bill must be debated in Parliament, but the McConnell family said it would be open to accepting amendments if it meant the bill passed.
McConnell said in any case he and his family are grateful to have their voices heard.
–With files from Paula Tran, Global News
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