Clearly I'm in favour of the two sections that refer to victims, but these are.... Well, the one on reparation and terrorism is a very important one. The one on greater standing for victims in the parole hearing is also progress. But it's a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed.
In very simple terms, if we began to spend intelligently the amount of money that we're expecting to spend on additional prisons--not just because of Bill C-10 but because of previous bills--and we began to match that with prevention and improving services for victims, we would probably, certainly within the next five to ten years, significantly reduce the need for incarceration.
My pleading here is that the most important thing to do is to address the $83 billion--that's $14 billion to $15 billion in tangible costs and $60 billion or so in intangible costs--that the Minister of Justice has talked about.
I do not share the view of some other experts that crime is going down in this country. If you look at the victimization survey, done only every five years...which it clearly isn't. We've seen a huge drop in reporting in this country, which the Minister of Justice has also mentioned.
So I think there's some urgency. I very much agree with the president of the CACP about this balance. He said, well, it's for a future event. I think it's important to do things now. The title of the report that I worked with for the Cameron government was “Less Crime, Lower Costs”. It's about preventing crime, preventing people from becoming victims. We have a huge amount of knowledge, some of which we're using in this country. We could be using way more to reduce those numbers significantly.