RCMP Criminal Background Check takes even longer.

I was at my brother's tonight. His wife's brother and family are visiting and he is in the RCMP. We talked about the whole fingerprint VSS check. He says it is worse than I was told. It will take 3-4 months to get the check done if you are lucky. Expect it to be more like 6 months.

Why? Because the government dumped the extra work on the RCMP, and other police forces, without actually giving them more people or money to do it. The VSS checks have a low priority. And there isn't any movement by the government to improve things.

I have already lost 12 jobs because of this. No one wants to wait 3-4 months, let alone 6, to hire someone to fill an empty position. So much for trying to find work in fields I am qualified in and would enjoy.

People who know nothing about the process but feel the need to tell me that it couldn't possibly be the way it is tend to irk me. One of those type of people was at my brother's (a mutual friend of my brother and I) during this conversation. Maybe now he won't feel the need to open his pie hole and speak about shit he knows nothing of, shit that I am actually having to deal with.

The joys of life.

RCMP Criminal Background Check

As I mentioned in other posts, the rules changed last year for having the Vulnerable Sector Search in Canada and it is causing headaches for some people. If you have the same birthday and gender as a sex offender who was registered and/or pardoned then your name/file becomes flagged. You must submit fingerprints in order to clear your name and prove you aren't this person.

CTV news, Live at Five, had a short blurb tonight about how the new rules are affecting an artist in St, John, New Brunswick. He needs the VSS to get a job teaching art. Because the check will take 3-4 months he may lose out on the job. After they told his story they talked to the MP for his area. He put out the standard BS answer about better to have to go through the check instead of letting an offender go undiscovered. While I can agree with that it doesn't address why the check takes so long. It was typical glib answer from a politician looking to make a sound byte for the evening news while ignoring the issue.

I actually have no problem with doing any check but there are some problems with the process. Problems the politician didn't mention.

1) It takes 3-4 months to clear your name. That is a ridiculous amount of time in this day and age. It took the RCMP 3 bloody months to do my check last year and then tell me that they couldn't do the VSS.

3-4 months to run a fingerprint check just strikes me as insane. Some government agencies actually bypass the RCMP check and have their own security people run the check and it is supposed to take 2 weeks. According to what I was told the finger prints are digitized and then a check is done by computer. Which leads to 2 questions a) why can't the RCMP do it in 2 weeks and b) why the does it take THAT long if they can just be run through a computer data base? Is there a commonality between data of birth and sex offenders that means there are hundreds or thousands of them with the same birthday so the search is huge? It just doesn't compute. (Pun intended.)

2) Unless it is for a Federal government job or SOME volunteer jobs you must pay to have the police clear your name.

Yes, you have to PAY to clear your name. Why the hell should I have to pay the police to prove I am innocent? Aren't they supposed to prove we are guilty? Isn't it the job of the police to gather evidence of our innocence or guilt? That is what they are PAID to do already right?

3) They do NOT do the VSS for jobs outside Canada.

They don't do the VSS for jobs outside of Canada? That just doesn't make sense, unless they are trying to lower their workload so they have less VSS checks to do. We should be making sure that we DON'T export sex offenders to other countries. Not doing this check for people seeking work outside the country just doesn't make sense. Hell, we have to pay for the bloody check anyway so why does it matter if it is a job inside or outside of Canada?

Will these problems be addressed? Probably not. People just continue to be screwed over by teh process.