Mr. Speaker, I guess when you are at 50 per cent in the polls you can afford to be smug and arrogant. However, as a journalist pointed out the other night, when the government is faced with honest questions from Canadians, it is like a bucket of cold water.
The government, it appears, has been sailing along for the last three years assuming that re-election was a matter of course, assuming that the Canadian public would continue to support it regardless of its actions.
Canadians are much smarter than that. History is full of politicians and political parties that have taken the public for granted. It is full of politicians and political parties that have become smug and arrogant.
Many a political party has been leading substantially in public opinion in between elections. I have been through a lot of elections. I have seen a lot of politicians and leaders, David Peterson, Lyn McLeod, Brian Mulroney; the list goes on and on of people who had substantial support in the weeks and months and a year before an election.
It is important that Canadians continue to speak out about their feelings about the criminal justice system. Quite frankly, I am shocked that people like Darlene Boyd, Debbie Mahaffy, Priscilla de Villiers and Donna French have not been able to move members of Parliament with respect to section 745 and criminal law reform.
These are women, mothers who have lost children to murders, hideous, awful murders that have shocked the country. These are mothers who, in order to deal with their grief, have channelled their energies into trying to change the criminal justice system.
There are members of Parliament who pretend to be sympathetic, who pretend to understand, who pretend to share their grief. However, when the time comes to be truly representative and to listen to these mothers who have lost children to murder, what happens? Members of Parliament turn a deaf ear.
It is important for all Canadians right across the country to continue to speak out, to continue to challenge their politicians, call their members of Parliament, tell them how they feel, tell them that they are not happy, tell them that unless there are meaningful changes to the criminal justice system, when they have the opportunity to vote they will take that matter into consideration.