General Information for the Applicants of Canada
The details that we request from you on the leading pardon application form, and in any result background examination, is required to evolve the starting point for an enlightened judgment about whether you should be granted a pardon. This is our only motive in asking you to complete and sign the application and, if required, requesting that an enquiry be made into your personality and activities. You are under no moral imperative to supply any details. However, if you do not give all the particulars requested, we may be not able to process your application. Failure to give your Social Security number will not prejudice your case.
In the development of examining your application, an agent of the Government may interview you and those persons who have accomplish character testimony or written letters of source on your behalf. Additionally, neighbours, one-time and recent employers, partners, and other individuals who may be able to give pertinent details regarding you may be interviewed. While such investigations are made careful and a sensible effort is made not to reveal the latent nature of the inquiries, we cannot convince you that the reason for the investigation will not become famous to some or all of the persons interviewed. A copy of each warrant of mercy is kept in this office as a public and official record. Copies of the public affairs intimations, mercy warrants, and records of recent mercy beneficiary are timely made accessible to the public upon request.
Executive mercy files are assembled and kept to help in using his constitutional mercy power and are timely made convenient to the members of the staff, and other government officials responsible with mercy legal actions. The Pardon legal practitioner may reveal the contents of executive mercy files when the revelation is needed by law or the ends of justice. On the other hand, non-public official papers that may be assembled in the course of handling a mercy application are not usually accessible under the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts. However, compatible to long-standing policy, this office would, if asked, affirm that a particular individual has put in an application for or was granted or contradict mercy.
The aforesaid rules tried to the revelation of documents in the ownership of the Department of Justice. Given the amount of such requests, the Office of the Pardon counsel has started to with full of enthusiasm reveals the names of persons who have been denied executive mercy by the head of the country, in fulfilment with our Freedom of Information Act commitment.