Criminal Background Checks

[Canfootball52]

Originally Posted by wwcfoa43

My problem with the Ontario bill was the wording in that anyone who hires an official has to get the background check done. So in practice this would mean that each league and even some individual teams would ALL have to get the check done. There is no room for having a centralized agent do the clearing in the wording. Technically, you could have a single agent hire the officials for all the contests to get around having them all do it.

My problem with the process in general is suppose an official when he was young and 18 makes a mistake and gets a DWI conviction. Thirty years later when those mistakes are long behind him he has to allow the leagues that hire him to know about this mistake and have it possibly bar him from officiating their games?

The only way this could work is to have a set of offences that would make an official fail their certification and then have a central body do the check so as to preserve the officials privacy.

You're not "hired" by the teams or the leagues, your local Officials Association "hires" you. They would be the one's doing the background checks, not the teams.

There's a big difference between a DWI conviction when you're young and stupid, and being a sexual predator when you're a "mature" adult.