On Friday, National Missing Children’s Day, Moose Jaw’s Melanie Alix handed Palliser MP Ray Boughen 7,333 signatures, which are in addition to several hundred signatures already accompanying a petition she and her local Member of Parliament are trying to get passed into law.
“This is not just for us,” Alix told media in Boughen’s office as she relinquished the stack of signatures aimed at keeping alive an issue of grave importance to the mother of Dylan Koshman, who was last seen in Edmonton in the early hours of Oct. 15, 2008.
“This might not help us, we don’t know, but it will help someone.”
On Feb. 1, Boughen presented the original petition in Parliament aimed at enacting legislation to create a DNA missing persons database and an unidentified human remains database.
The government recently responded that it believes crime scene DNA analysis is important for Canadian law enforcement agencies, and that the 2010 federal budget provided $14 million over two years to increase the ability to process crime scene DNA samples so that results could be added to the National DNA Data Base.
However, Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews stated in the official response: “The creation of such indices continues to raise a number of complex legal, privacy, financial and practical considerations.”
For more on this story, read an upcoming edition of the Times-Herald.
