I consider a love of reading to be the greatest gift my parents gave me. So, when I found out about the ‘Reading Buddies’ program at our local library, the opportunity to spend an hour a week sharing my love of reading and paying forward the gift of reading, I picked up an application.

While my mother gave me (and my siblings) the gift of reading, her alcoholism gave us the behaviour and thought patterns of children of alcoholism. I became a member of Alanon to deal with the profound negative effect growing up in an alcoholic household had on my life. The awareness of the profound negative effect growing up with alcoholism had, and would have continued to have if I had not found Alanon, is why I considered it important to volunteer when Alanon Sponsors were needed for our local Alateen group.

Being a dedicated swimmer led to meeting the male members of our local Special Olympics swim team as we shared a change room – they leaving practice and I arriving for the supper time length swim. When the team had a desperate need for volunteers……well, spending an extra 90 minutes in the water was not a real hard sacrifice for me to make.

While poverty may not permit me to financially support programs and organizations it has not prevented me from supporting programs and organizations in my community by volunteering. Even being homeless in Abbotsford, living in my car on the streets of Abbotsford did not prevent or interfere with my volunteering with the Special Olympic swim team.

No, it took BC government legislation to put an end to my volunteering.

Understand, I fully support the requirement for police checks for those working with youth or vulnerable individuals. Over the years I have had many police checks done .

When the province decided to bring in legislation to require police checks for all, rather than leaving the choice up to the individual organizations I felt it was only common sense. And since the organizations I volunteered with already required police checks, I foresaw no effect on me from legislating a police check as a requirement.

I do not know what had the government taking the sloppy route in drafting the legislation. It really doesn’t matter. What matters is that the government produced legislation that was seriously flawed.

When the legislation was introduced supporters of privacy and civil liberties pointed out to the government that the legislation contained an assault on both privacy and civil liberties of citizens. Mathematicians pointed out that statistical analysis showed a significant percentage of volunteers would be faced with the need to decide between violations/intrusions into their privacy, civil liberties and charter rights to get a police check or walking away from volunteering.

Which is the situation I found myself in and mulling over, meditating on and wrestling with this past week, after getting a call from the Abbotsford Police Department that they required my fingerprints in order to complete my Criminal Record Check. Never before, in over a decade of criminal record checks, has there been any problem.

Giving or being required to give the APD my fingerprints when I have done nothing wrong is a violation of my privacy, civil liberties and charter rights that I cannot countenance.

Last year I turned down an opportunity to attend (without any out of pocket cost to me) an interesting conference in the USA because of the privacy violations that go with flying into [or simply over] the USA. Even visiting my favourite used book store cannot tempt me into crossing the border into the USA. And Mr Harper’s cavalier selling out of Canadians privacy to the USA is among the top reasons on my ‘why I feel an uncontrollable need to kick Stephen Harper’s a** list’.

At a time when government cutbacks and funding cuts are making the services provided by volunteer organizations more and more vital, and at a time that many volunteer organizations cannot find the volunteers they need, the sloppy structure of the British Columbia Criminal Records Review Act is forcing volunteers to walk away from volunteering.

The sloppy drafting of BC’s British Columbia Criminal Records Review Act has added my name to its list of victims and has cost two local organizations a long time volunteer and denied another a new volunteer.

I have never had any problem with the need to provide a criminal record check and walking away from volunteering was a difficult and painful decision, that remains unsettling.

But I cannot, will not, allow the state (in this case BC) to violate my privacy, civil liberties and charter rights by forcing me to provide fingerprints, for the state’s convenience, in order to satisfy a piece of poorly drafted legislation.