I think our guest knows where I stand on a lot of these things. I too am disappointed that there aren't some statistics about bail. But when you look at risk and the safety of victims, we have lots of possible things that could happen that we look after pretty well.
When I was a farm lad, we had a vicious German shepherd. You made certain he was confined in a situation where he couldn't go after any guests who came to the farm. We had a bull you didn't want to jump in the corral with. That was well known to people who happened to come to the place. You look after risk.
I come from a small town, and we had one incident in our area where a person who was out on bail murdered two people and then killed himself. To me, that was the very thing that said that's enough of that. You don't take those kinds of risks. That's just common sense. If the person has demonstrated that he's capable of possibly doing it, then you don't take the chance. Nobody likes to play Russian roulette.
What does it take? What kind of a stat would make you and your organization say, well, now it makes more sense, maybe we should support this kind of bill? To me and, I would venture to say, millions of Canadians, it takes one. You just don't do it. It just doesn't make sense.
As a principal at a school, I had a kid who was arrested as part of...well, they called them the “apple dumpling gang”. He was 17, and he was part of this gang that robbed the Bank of Montreal at gunpoint in our hometown. Two days later, he was back in school. I thought that was rather strange: “You participated in a bank robbery, you weren't successful, you got arrested, and now you're back in school.” “Well, I'm out on bail.” So I talked to him about all these things.
But when you demonstrate that you could very possibly be a threat, why do you want to play with people's lives and take the chance?