Madam Speaker, I want to thank all of my colleagues on the Conservative benches today for their interventions on this motion. It is incredibly disappointing that we even had to bring this motion forward, because the Liberals will not do the right thing.
It was so disconcerting to sit here all day and listen to Liberal after Liberal get up to feign their condolences and so-called sympathies for the family, but then defend the decision by the public safety minister not to intervene in this situation or rectify a decision that was callous and, in my opinion, broke the law under the Victims Bill of Rights. They really demonstrated to Canadians that they would rather advocate for the convicted, that they would rather stand up for the criminal, that they would rather hug the thug than show compassion and reason toward the family members who have suffered from these terrible, brutal murders. These victims have rights and they deserve respect, compassion, understanding and information from the Government of Canada. Some of the arguments that have been presented today are just ludicrous. For the Liberals to continue to try to hide behind a bunch of rhetoric, talking points and so-called statistics does not right the wrong. It does not justify this decision.
We have to look at the situation here. The court system has passed judgment. Justice needs to be served now. Terri-Lynne McClintic was given a life sentence without parole for 25 years, and all the research that I have done on these very sadistic, deranged murderers such as Terri-Lynne McClintic is that they never do get parole. They serve out their life sentences as incarcerated convicts.
I have been in contact with families over the years who have had to deal with the loss of loved ones because of convicted killers like Clifford Olson, Paul Bernardo and Robert Pickton. These people will never make parole. The parole boards will never grant them the opportunity to re-enter society. Therefore, this idea that we are going to move this convicted murderer, this child killer, Terri-Lynne McClintic, into a minimum security facility to make sure she is properly rehabilitated many years before she ever will even stand a chance of standing before a parole board for a hearing is ridiculous. She needs to serve her time. Everything I have seen in the news is that she has not been a model prisoner. This is a lady who continues to brag about how she killed Tori Stafford. This is a lady who has assaulted and stomped on other inmates she is incarcerated with.
Some people in this chamber, such as the NDP and the Liberals, talk about the poor family going through this. I can tell them that if they read the Facebook page of Rodney Stafford, they would see that he has been posting about this ridiculous idea that Terri-Lynne McClintic deserved to go to a healing lodge. He has helped organize a protest for Tori Stafford on November 2 here on the Hill. He wants all of us to go out there and promote it if the Liberals do not back down. He is giving an opportunity to the Minister of Public Safety to reverse this decision. He has given him a month to change course here.
We are seeing no leadership here from the Prime Minister and the Minister of Public Safety. For them to suggest that we review the situation and the decisions made by Correctional Service Canada is ridiculous. When there is public outrage like this, all he has to do is to follow the example set by our current Minister of Agriculture when he served as the solicitor general under Jean Chrétien back in 1998 when a similar situation occurred when a mass murderer was being transferred to a lower security prison. The public screamed in outrage and disgust over it.
He immediately, as the solicitor general, changed that decision. He intervened and showed leadership. What we are seeing here is passing the buck. The Minister of Public Safety is just pushing it off to the bureaucrats and saying, “You guys figure this out.” He is not taking any role whatsoever or accepting responsibility for what has happened. That, to me, is not accountability. It is not at all the role of government. If we look at our rules and procedures in our rule book, it clearly stipulates that accountability lies with the minister of each department, so the Minister of Public Safety has to face the music on this one, and we are not seeing that.
Of course, he calls this murder by Terri-Lynne McClintic her “bad practices”. I will tell members what bad practice is. First, it is his lack of leadership. Second, the Correctional Service of Canada did not respect the Victims Bill of Rights. The victim, in this case Rodney Stafford and his family, has the right to information about the goings-on of the accused, this being Terri-Lynne McClintic. He has the right to information through the entire judicial process as well as through the entire time she is serving her time for the crime. Here we are, nine months after the fact, before the public even found out that she was transferred to the healing lodge, a minimum security facility.
We are going to hear from the Liberals who say that we had healing lodges. Yes, I think minimum security facilities are necessary. I have in my riding Stony Mountain Institution. It has maximum security, it has minimum security and it has medium security. By far, most of the inmates are in the medium-security facility. Only those who are in transition to be released back into the public and who have been model inmates get to go to minimum security.
If we tour minimum security, what used to be what we called the farm, the guards are not knocking on the door every hour. Inmates are allowed to wander the yards. The inmates actually live in an apartment-style complex, where they are expected to cook for themselves. They have to go to the store, and they are supposed to do a job while they are there, whether they are working in one of the trades they are teaching there or are going to school. That is what happens in minimum security. In medium security, the inmates get to mix during the day within their ranges, but in medium security, they are still behind a fence, they are behind a wall, and at night, they are behind bars in their cells.
What is happening here to Terri-Lynne McClintic is, as was pointed out by my colleague, more like living in a university dormitory than like actually being in jail. She does not deserve to be there, as a child murderer, as someone who has assaulted other inmates. All I hear is a lack of compassion and a lack of common sense and the defence of the convicted coming from the Liberal benches.
Other ministers of public safety have shown leadership on these files before and have reversed decisions. When Vic Toews was the minister of public safety and when Stockwell Day was public safety minister, they had similar situations happen, and they intervened and corrected the course of their departments.
The member for Winnipeg Centre got up and actually suggested that some of us over on this side were going to say to bring Terri-Lynne McClintic in here and hang her from the gallows. It is outrageous that a person would come in here and make that type of comment. That is egregious. He should apologize for that. I am a person who is very convicted in my morality. I am pro-life. I would never advocate for capital punishment in any way, shape or form. For him to accuse me or anyone else on this side of wanting that is something that he needs to be held accountable for, and I demand an apology from him.
I was incited by the murder of Tori Stafford. It broke my heart, so shortly after the murder, I brought forward a bill in 2010. I tabled it in this House, and it is actually up for second reading next month. It is Bill C-266, the respecting families of murdered and brutalized persons act. It is to make sure that those individuals who are incarcerated who have abducted, sexually assaulted, tortured and murdered their victims should not be allowed to reach parole eligibility for 40 years. Terri-Lynne McClintic is one of those persons. She should not be allowed to move around, have her sentence reduced, or apply for parole and re-victimize those families. We have to respect the families, and in this case, the Stafford family.
