Mr. Speaker, 1,600 is the number of crimes that happen in this country every single day. That is almost one crime per minute.
These are not statistics. They are innocent people being hit over the head with baseball bats. They are jewellery stores being smashed in and opened up by an incoming automobile, which is then used to steal the proceeds families have spent their entire lives earning. They are the people who wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of stomping feet on their living room floor as home invaders break in to steal, rob, pillage and much worse.
They are the Farooqi family, whose courageous father came running out to protect his defenceless children against home invaders and was shot in the throat. It is a three-year-old girl who was mercilessly raped by a chronic repeat offender, a scumbag who had already been convicted of raping a 12-year-old boy yet, under Liberal laws, was out on the street.
That was the case for a woman killed in Saint-Jérôme by her former partner, a man who had already been arrested 30 times and released 16 times before killing his partner.
It is the case of a beautiful young mother, Bailey McCourt, murdered by her ex, who was out on bail and had been released only three hours earlier. He was only four kilometres away from the courthouse that granted him that Liberal bail.
These are not just sensationalist stories, as Liberals like to dismiss them; these are facts. While the justice minister condescendingly dismissed these crimes, saying we are not in the Wild West, the facts would beg to differ.
Under the Liberal government, since it has taken office, violent crime is up 55%, extortion is up 330%, homicides are up 29% and sexual assaults are up 76%. There is a cause and there is an effect. We know the source of this crime. It is Liberal bail, as passed into law by Liberal Bill C-75. It requires judges to release the accused at the “earliest reasonable opportunity” on the “least onerous” restrictions. Those are the words embedded in the law. As a result, the same offenders can commit literally hundreds of offences and be released, often within hours of their latest arrest.
Police say they have often not even finished the paperwork in the arrest and the offender is back out on the street. I have had police officers tell me they have arrested the same offender three times in the same day. One police officer in the Toronto area told me that in most arrests, the criminals happily confess to the crime in the back seat of the car because they do not care about being convicted anymore. They know that Liberal laws will turn them loose, regardless of the outcome of the trial.
Liberals pulled a bait and switch in order to get elected. In the last election, they knew Canadians were fed up with Liberal bail, so they said, “Give us a fourth chance and we will reverse course.” What happened? It has now been six months since the Prime Minister was elected on the promise that he would reverse Liberal bail. Where are we? There has not been a single Liberal bill to reverse the bail system they set up. We are six months in.
We all know what needs to happen. The police have basically written the legislative repeal that is necessary for us to fix the Liberal mess, yet there is no bill. There is nothing. There is zero, zip, zilch.
Maybe it is because the Prime Minister took the unprecedentedly reckless act of appointing Justin Trudeau's most incompetent minister to the job. The justice minister was the immigration minister who literally destroyed the best system in the world, increasing the numbers by 300% over the previous norm, allowing criminals to come into our country unvetted and swamping our housing, jobs and health care with too many people too fast. He then went on to the housing portfolio, where he created the worst housing crisis in the OECD, and now he is in charge of the Criminal Code.
Compound that problem with the Minister of Public Safety, who should resign for having gone ahead with a plan to confiscate property from law-abiding firearms owners. It was a plan that he was caught on tape saying would not work. This is who we have as the keystone cops in charge of reversing the Liberal crime wave of the last decade.
Some people say we need bail reform. We have bail reform. It is called Bill C-75. What we need is to undo Liberal bail reform; hence today, we are calling for the government to scrap Liberal bail and replace it with jail, not bail. Today, we put forward a motion that would allow Parliament to adopt Bill C-242, the jail not bail act. It was put forward by the brilliant member of Parliament for Oxford, Ontario. This proposal is backed by police, crime victims and everybody who wants to stop crime.
The House will hear more from the member for Niagara South, with whom I am splitting my time on this matter.
I will note that members of the government do not need to do a thing. They just need to get out of the way. They have already broken the bail system. They brought in the chaos we are now experiencing. We are not asking them to put on a cape and come to the rescue. We are asking them to simply get out of the way. If they do one thing, it should be to sit on their hands and let the House of Commons pass this motion to quickly push through the jail not bail act. We can lock up the criminals who have been terrorizing our streets. That is all we need them to do.
In fact, some people say they are doing nothing. It would be great if they did nothing, because nothing would be a massive improvement over what they have been doing, which is doing violence to our Criminal Code. Our Criminal Code has allowed criminals to do violence to our people.
The answer is actually very simple. Pseudo-intellectuals in Liberal circles love to say the problem is much more complicated. It is not a complicated problem. The statistics tell us the extent of it. We have a very small number of criminals doing a phenomenal amount of crime. The same 40 offenders in Vancouver got arrested 6,000 times. That is 150 arrests per offender per year, and those were just the occasions they were caught. Almost all of the crime is done by a tiny group of rampant reoffenders. If we keep them in jail, they cannot reoffend. It is very simple.
We did this under the previous Conservative government. One thing happened that was unsurprising and one that was maybe counterintuitive. The first thing, unsurprisingly, is that crime went down by 25%. It plummeted. It was the biggest drop in crime in modern Canadian history. It worked.
The second part was a bit counterintuitive. What else went down? It was incarcerations. After Liberals warned that we would have to build new jails to accommodate all of the prisoners, fewer people, in fact, ended up in jail. Why? It is because the same offenders who were coming in and going out just stayed behind bars. We had already reserved them a room. It was like the Hotel California, where they checked out but never really left. We kept them in the cell and never let them out. We locked them up and threw away the key.
Something else happened. The small-time offenders or those looking to get involved in a life of crime said, “Hell, no. The penalty is too serious. I'm going to get a job and follow the law.” Deterrence works.
The facts are in. Liberal bail has brought hell to our streets. The only one keeping that hell in place is the Prime Minister. He and his government need to get out of the way so Conservatives can scrap Liberal bail, lock up the criminals and throw away the key. Let us do this not out of vengeance or spite, but out of love for law-abiding people so that our children can once again play safely in our streets, so that people can go to bed at night in peace and tranquillity, so that when they wake up in the morning, their car is still there, and so that we have a safe country where law-abiding people can live good, secure, happy, worry-free lives. That is what we are working for. Will the government get out of the way and let us get it done?
