Justice committee  Absolutely, yes. Community safety is a joint responsibility between all Canadian citizens and their local police services. If left alone to deal with crime and criminal quality-of-life issues, the police would be very unsuccessful dealing with community safety. We absolutely need

Justice committee  In Woodstock alone, in our small community of 40,000 people, we investigate probably 250 reports of missing children every year, and 99.99% of the time, it's for an innocent reason. The child just hasn't come home and has gone to a buddy's house, or whatever. Those are the ones w

Justice committee  I'd like to comment that we could do a lot better in a lot of areas of the Criminal Code. I think that's why Canadians are looking at our system and sometimes viewing it as too weak. I think there are improvements we can make. In the case of the kidnapping of a child under 16 ye

Justice committee  I would have my doubts. Even inmates have their standards, and I don't think these two will ever see general population..... I know Rafferty will not see general population, I wouldn't expect. McClintic is in a slightly different environment. I think she'll be in a controlled e

Justice committee  That's right. They see them as the pitiful misfits that we see them as. As I say, even criminals have their standards, and child abduction, child rape, child murder is the very bottom of that cesspool.

Justice committee  I absolutely believe so. If you polled parents with children, I think you'd be talking about much higher numbers than we're talking about at five years.

Justice committee  I don't think this would have stopped him, no. He is an absolute monster, and he is now away, hopefully for the rest of his life, where he will never, ever harm another child, as is his accomplice. Those two were fuelled by the Internet, by pornography. They were googling a lot o

Justice committee  Thank you, sir. My short answer is, no. I don't think additional police officers would stop this problem. In this investigation we brought in 1,000 investigators in the aftermath to do the investigation. These predators, the people who are preying on our children, do so very co

Justice committee  Thankfully I've had very few abduction investigations, but I have had a couple. One I will remind you of, which I was involved in when I was chief in Fergus, was Peter Whitmore, now incarcerated for life, I believe. He was a sex offender in Ontario who had a propensity to abduct

Justice committee  I'm not familiar with that statistic, but I'll accept what you're saying.

Justice committee  It is.

Justice committee  You do have to consider all the circumstances, but quite frankly, I'd be at the upper end leaning toward life imprisonment. They can't be rehabilitated. They've harmed sweet, innocent children. That has had an impact on the family, and the ripple effect is incredible. My entire c

Justice committee  I fully believe that's happening out there in some cases. That's why I chose to stand with Mr. Wilks on this bill. That is entirely unacceptable. I don't care what other peripheral circumstances may factor into the decision, that is absolutely unacceptable. I believe the victim

Justice committee  I would agree with you, sir. Yes.

Justice committee  I'd be pleased to, and thank you very much for the opportunity. In speaking with Mr. Wilks, we see this as just a starting point. In some of the other cases you may have reviewed with the penalties of eight years and so on up to life, those sentences may have included other off