Madam Speaker, I am hearing from the opposition Conservative Party that it would be higher.
The reality is that they have gone to a number of provisions and the crime rate has remained steady. The three strikes law was supposed to be a deterrent. The crime rate in California has not declined and in a number of cases where the three strikes law was applicable, the crime rate actually went up. That cannot be argued.
If we look to the European experience in particular, more progressive approaches have been taken to deal with criminal behaviour. The Europeans have been able to drive their crime rate down as we have in this country.
It was interesting to listen to the member for Langley because he kept emphasizing that we have a serious crime problem. No one will deny that we have crime in this country but the absolute reality by any measure is that our crime rates are going down in every single area in the country. Whatever the crime, the statistics show that over the last two decades our crime rates have declined in every single area, whether it be violent crime or property crime. Every single rate has gone down.
We could pick isolated areas in the country. We could go into the core areas of some of our major cities and say the rates have gone up, and they have, but across the country as a whole in every single area the crime rates have declined. The reason they have declined has absolutely nothing to do with sentencing. I know our judges do not like hearing that but that is the reality. They have gone down because we have dealt with them at a societal level.
We have moved a strong police force in. Any time I have studied anything historically around crime rates, I have come away absolutely convinced that we lower the crime rate when we convince a person who has a criminal intent that he or she is going to get caught.
Since being elected, I have had the opportunity to do some travelling. Recently I was in Sri Lanka and I asked about the crime rate there. I was doing a comparison with the crime rate in Johannesburg with regard to car jacking. I spoke to police officers who had the facts in front of them, as opposed to what we usually get from the Conservative Party with regard to crime rates.
In the capital city of Sri Lanka, which is a large city of several million people, there is minimum car jackings as opposed to in Johannesburg where it is a major problem. When we look at the comparisons, the numbers are phenomenally different, multiples of hundreds of percentage points different. Distinguishing between the two, both cities had come out of some really violent history in terms of civil war and insurrection within both countries and the only answer for the difference is the quality of the police forces in those cities.