Given some of the exchanges we've had today, let me make a comment.
What's really going on here is that the government is obsessed with punishment. I was just reading one of the quotes from Minister Finley this past spring when she said, referring to prisoners who are eligible for OAS, that they should be getting punishment, not pensions. It's that mindset, Madam Chair, that is the problem here.
If we had taken a much more holistic.... If we take the Russell Williams case, since we're dealing with individual cases here, Mr. Watson is wrong. If you look at the opportunities we had here for amending both the OAS and the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, specifically section 78, we had the opportunity to deal meaningfully with claims from victims. Think of those women who were raped by Mr. Williams. Think of the families of the women who were killed. If these funds had been available, we have existing laws that would have....
And there are more funds. Mr. Williams is eligible for a pension of $65,000 per year. If that fund had been made available--which it is not now--to the victims, then we actually could have compensated them financially for the lost time that the families are going to suffer, for the counselling they're going to need, and for the other expenses that we know victims incur. If this government were really meaningful in wanting to deal with victims, that's one of the ways. They had an opportunity to do it here. Are we going to be faced with another piece of legislation at some point in the future? Maybe.
Let me turn to one question. It's not fair to you, probably, to ask this question, but I want to get it on the record. I would like to have asked it of the minister. Was there any consideration given to expanding section 78 so that we could have got at other resources--CPP, OAS, the supplement, private pensions, and private assets--when people were incarcerated, especially for those kinds of crimes?