I certainly did. I don't think public policy should be driven solely by campaign rhetoric. Referring back to rhetoric in a campaign, which two or three members have done, is not helpful. Our job here is to make good public policy, good legislation, and I think all the members around the table want to do that, not simply emulate rhetoric that occurred in the heat of a political campaign, driven by events that most of us didn't have much control over. So I'm firmly focused on that.
The one point I want to make is that this bill would increase the frequency and length of incarceration for people who are convicted. But you don't get a conviction and you don't get a sentence of any nature until you have an investigation and enforcement and a conviction. If this bill goes ahead, that's one thing. If this bill doesn't go ahead, I would challenge the government to take all of the money that it had budgeted for increased incarcerations and make it available to law enforcement, at least for gang-related or organized crime type of enforcement. The police have made that very clear, that they can't fight organized crime on the property tax base. Cities can't do it. I challenge the government to finance, underwrite, help to pay for the kind of police enforcement that Chief Blair from Toronto talked about, witnesses from Vancouver talked about, Montreal talked about, and look for public policy payoff in increased safety from increased enforcement by the professionals who know how to do it, not from politicians who know how to do the sentencing math and just increase the sentences. The people we're going to be sentencing are people who are already going to be sentenceable in front of the courts, because they will have been tried and convicted of an offence.
So I challenge the government to do that. And I regret that this bill and other legislation—I'll end with this—were introduced by the government. It came out of campaigns, a campaign rhetoric scenario; they were introduced by a justice minister who's no longer with us, probably because he was too much by half. You might wonder why we have a new justice minister now. The reason may be buried in what we're trying to accomplish here today. As one member, I'd be prepared to spend more time trying to salvage what's here, but if it can't be materially substantially changed, I'm going to find if awfully difficult to support it going ahead as a whole.
Thank you.