Bill 138 amends Ontario’s Change of Name Act to make people who are subject to Christopher’s Law (the provincial sex offender registry) ineligible to apply for a legal name change. It also authorizes ministry staff to access and share registry information with the Registrar General so registry status can be checked during the name-change process.
The measure centralizes an exception process: the Attorney General (or an authorized delegate) can certify a specific change of name despite registry-based ineligibility. The bill includes regulatory delegation for additional exceptions and sets a staggered commencement for part of the changes.
At a Glance
What It Does
The bill inserts a new section (4.1) into the Change of Name Act that disqualifies persons who are required to comply with Christopher’s Law from applying for a name change, with an Attorney General certification exception. It amends Christopher’s Law to permit ministry employees to access and disclose registry information to the Registrar General for this purpose.
Who It Affects
People registered on Ontario’s sex offender registry and anyone who would be required to register but for certain statutory exceptions; the Registrar General and the ministry that maintains the registry; Attorney General’s office and staff who will handle certification requests.
Why It Matters
This bill ties identity-change controls directly to the sex offender registry, converting registry status into a statutory bar on name changes and creating a formal data flow between justice administrators and vital statistics—shifting how identity and public-safety information are used in civil registration.
More articles like this one.
A weekly email with all the latest developments on this topic.
What This Bill Actually Does
The bill creates a new, statutory bar on changing a legal name when a person is recorded on Ontario’s sex offender registry. In practice this means a person who must comply with section 3 of Christopher’s Law cannot file a new name application under the Change of Name Act.
The ban also sweeps in people who would have to register but for very specific carve-outs already set out in Christopher’s Law, broadening the set of ineligible applicants beyond strictly current registrants.
To operationalize the ban, the bill authorizes ministry employees to access the sex offender registry at any time, to collect, retain and use registry information for the purpose of enforcing the new name-change restriction, and to disclose that information to the Registrar General. The Registrar General is expressly permitted to collect and retain registry-derived information for its own name-change processes and must inform an applicant if they are ineligible and why.The statute preserves an important central exception: the Attorney General (or a designated representative) can certify a particular change of name, effectively overriding the ineligibility.
The Lieutenant Governor in Council is also empowered to make regulations creating other exceptions and conditions. The bill includes a transition clause keeping prior applications under the old rules and delays the coming-into-force of one subsection for six months after the main provision is proclaimed.These changes are structural rather than merely procedural: they create a standing, routinized link between a criminal-justice database and civil identity records and push key discretion to the Attorney General and to future regulations.
The mechanism alters who can access name-change relief and how review and oversight will need to be handled going forward.
The Five Things You Need to Know
The bill adds section 4.1 to the Change of Name Act making persons required to comply with section 3 of Christopher’s Law ineligible to apply for a name change.
It also covers people who would be required to comply with section 3 but for the application of subsections 7(2) or 7(3) of Christopher’s Law, capturing certain statutory exceptions.
The Attorney General, or someone authorized by the Attorney General, can certify and thereby permit a name change despite the ineligibility in section 4.1(2).
Christopher’s Law is amended to allow ministry employees to access the sex offender registry at any time and to disclose registry information to the Registrar General for enforcement of the name-change restriction.
The Registrar General must notify an applicant of ineligibility and the reason; part of the Act comes into force by proclamation, but one subsection is delayed six months after proclamation.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
Every bill we cover gets an analysis of its key sections.
Creates a statutory bar to name changes for registrants and near-registrants
This provision is the bill’s core: it adds section 4.1 which lists two categories of ineligible applicants — those required to comply with section 3 of Christopher’s Law and those who would be required but for the application of subsections 7(2) or 7(3) of that Act. The practical effect is to convert registry status and certain near-miss statuses into automatic disqualification from the statutory name-change pathway unless another part of the Act applies.
Attorney General certification and mandatory notice to applicants
Subsection 4.1(2) creates a single, case-by-case override: the Attorney General can certify a change of name despite ineligibility. Subsection 4.1(3) obliges the Registrar General to inform any person who seeks a name change that they are ineligible and to state the reason. That notice duty is operationally important: it requires the Registrar General to explain the factual basis for denial and creates an administrative record for any subsequent challenge.
Cross-references and delegation to regulation-making
The bill adjusts an existing cross-reference in section 7.1(1) (to include whether a person falls under the new disqualification) and adds an explicit regulatory power in section 13(2) allowing the Lieutenant Governor in Council to create exceptions and conditions to the Act. That delegation means Cabinet can craft categories of permitted name changes or set procedural conditions without further primary-legislation changes.
Authorizes registry access and disclosure to Registrar General
These subsections let ministry employees or authorized persons access, collect, retain and use registry information at any time to administer the Change of Name Act, and to disclose registry details to the Registrar General. This is a concrete data-sharing pathway: the ministry’s staff will act as the bridge between the criminal-justice database and vital-statistics decisions, and the Registrar General is explicitly authorized to keep and use the disclosed information for name-change enforcement.
Staggered coming-into-force and conventional short title
The Act comes into force on proclamation generally, but subsection 1(2) (which appears to govern timing for certain parts) comes into force six months after subsection 1(1) is proclaimed. The transition clause in 4.1(4) preserves the old rules for any election or application submitted before proclamation, and the Act adopts the short title Change of Name Amendment Act, 2023.
This bill is one of many.
Codify tracks hundreds of bills on this topic across all five countries.
Explore this topic in Codify Search →Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost
Every bill creates winners and losers. Here's who stands to gain and who bears the cost.
Who Benefits
- Survivors and potential victims: The bill reduces the risk that a person subject to registry requirements can obtain a new legal name to obscure identity, which can aid notification, monitoring and community safety efforts.
- Law enforcement and registry administrators: The explicit data-sharing authorization streamlines access to registry status for civil processes and reduces reliance on ad hoc information requests.
- Registrar General / Vital Statistics operations: The Registrar General gains statutory authority to check registry status and a clear legal basis to deny ineligible applicants and to retain relevant records, reducing legal uncertainty about information use.
- General public and institutions that rely on accurate identity records: Organizations that depend on stable identity data—schools, employers checking public records—benefit indirectly from a reduced chance that registrants can mask identity via a name change.
Who Bears the Cost
- Persons required to register under Christopher’s Law and those captured by the 'would be required' language: They lose access to the statutory name-change route and face ongoing identification constraints.
- Ministry and Registrar General: Implementing realtime checks, access controls, disclosure mechanisms and secure record retention creates administrative and IT costs and requires procedural changes.
- Attorney General’s office: The certification exception concentrates discretion and will likely generate case-by-case processing, requests and possibly appeals, increasing workload.
- Privacy oversight bodies and courts: Increased data flows between criminal-justice and civil registries will generate complaints, oversight work and potential litigation, imposing indirect costs on oversight institutions.
- Defence counsel and legal aid: Individuals seeking to challenge denials or obtain certification may require legal services, shifting demand onto legal service providers and public legal aid programs.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The bill confronts a classic trade-off: protect public safety and community notice by preventing identity changes by registrants versus protecting individual privacy and the rehabilitative value of allowing name changes; the statute solves for safety by default but pushes crucial fairness questions—who gets an exception, on what evidence, and under what review—into delegated regulation and singular executive certification.
The bill ties two distinct administrative systems together but leaves many operational details to regulations and internal procedures. It authorizes broad registry access and retention but does not specify minimum data-security standards, retention periods for registry-derived records held by the Registrar General, or precise procedural steps for how registry checks will occur during the application process.
Those omissions create implementation risk: matching errors between registry records and name-change applicants could produce wrongful denials, and the absence of specified safeguards raises privacy and data-protection questions.
The statutory language also sweeps beyond current registrants by including people who "would be required" to register but for subsections 7(2) or (3) of Christopher’s Law; the bill does not clarify which situations those subsections cover. That ambiguity risks over-inclusion (catching individuals who pose little ongoing risk) or under-inclusion (failing to capture persons who should be blocked), and will place a heavy interpretive burden on administrators and courts.
Finally, the Attorney General’s certification power centralizes a high-stakes discretionary override without setting criteria or timelines for decisions, creating potential for inconsistent outcomes and calls for transparent guidelines or appeal routes.
There's more to this law than the bill.
Codify Laws traces every connection across the legislative lifecycle.