IF you need to produce a police background check to work or volunteer with children or other vulnerable people, you could be facing a wait time of anywhere from six weeks to three months or longer.
North Vancouver RCMP are asking the public to be patient as they plow through a huge backlog generated by new federal standards.
"It's out of our control; it's right across the country," said detachment spokesman Cpl. Richard De Jong.
The regulations, which came into effect last summer, reduce the number of search terms police use when running volunteers through their database. The change has vastly increased the number of innocent people who raise red flags on the way through, slowing down the process.
"In a given year, we have thousands of people come in," he said. "They are backlogged. Every sports group, every volunteer group, children's group, churches, libraries, any time you have people working who may be exposed to children. The list goes on and on."
Police check an applicant's name, birthday and gender against a national database of sex offenders. But since an offender could legally change their name in another province, the search will return a possible hit if an applicant has a similar birthday and gender. With roughly 14,000 offenders in the database, most of them male, the chances of a false positive are good.
In North Vancouver, De Jong said, "one in four people come back as a potential - that's a key word - or possible hit. So the only way to differentiate you from that person who may have changed their name is through fingerprinting."
That means fingerprinting hundreds of people and sending the results back east.
On top of that process, De Jong said many hopeful volunteers have been frustrated by new identification requirements.
"Now the government says it's not enough to bring your driver's licence and Care Card," he said. Applicants need to bring two of the following: a passport written in English, a driver's licence, birth certificate, citizenship card, Nexus pass, student visa, work visa, BCID card, school ID card, permanent resident card, firearms acquisition licence or status card.
"There are people showing up without the required ID and they're leaving in a huff and have to come back," De Jong said.
De Jong said he's well aware that the multi-month wait could mean a lost job or a coach unable to join a team.
"Please be patient with us. There's some light at the end of the tunnel as we streamline the process and train more staff," he said. "At the end of the day, it's to protect the innocent. All it takes is one person to sneak through the system and the results could be devastating."
