Senator Omidvar: Senator Pate, thank you for your ongoing advocacy for reform of the criminal justice system. At committee, when we discussed criminal justice reforms in various aspects, the model of the Nordic countries has always been held out to us. My question is: Will we be the trailblazers with this bill or will we follow the lead of other jurisdictions?

Senator Pate: Thank you for that question. We wouldn’t be trailblazers. As I mentioned, there are countries like Germany, New Zealand and others that already have record suspension. You mentioned the Nordic countries. Places like Portugal have essentially created record expiry processes, but they don’t call them that. I think we would have a lot to learn in terms of what kinds of approaches if we didn’t want to take this approach. But what we are proposing in this bill is a streamlined way of allowing records to expire that has been actually suggested by the government.