Certainly, and I think the starting point in this analysis is getting past preconceived notions that certain people in Canada may have about political actors who belong to one party or another.
The reality, I think, is that parliamentarians from every partisan persuasion understand that if a person poses a public safety threat and commits a crime, they should face penalties, and incarceration may be an appropriate penalty if it's required to maintain public safety in this country. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but I think that sometimes we have to say that. As a Liberal, if there is a violent person who's going to threaten my neighbours, I'm comfortable with them being incarcerated.
I also know that changing the criminal law in and of itself is not sufficient in the long term to have permanent marked improvements when it comes to public safety. If we're not trying to advance a strategy to achieve those long-term public safety outcomes, then we're doing it wrong. Strengthening the criminal law is part of it, and also making sure that law enforcement have the tools they need to enforce and investigate those laws and work with the prosecution to bring them to trial, including having not only the resources they need, which will engage concerns around provincial responsibilities as well, but also the legislative tools they need.
At the end of the day, you have to take a citizen-centred and community-centred approach and realize that we know, from extensive academic study, that people who live with mental health and addictions are at an increased risk of interfacing with the police. People who do not have a place to sleep are at an increased risk of engaging with public safety officials. People who grow up in low-income neighbourhoods and low-income families are disproportionally represented when it comes to the criminal justice system. There's obviously a significant racialization to the population of those who interface with the system as well. You realize that there's a very long-standing, deep set of layers of social issues that intersect with the public safety issues we're discussing.
If we don't try to tackle those social issues, we're going to be repeating this conversation 10 or 20 years from now when various governments repeal or put in place new laws. We need to make sure that people in Canada have the ability to live safely in their communities. That means making those upstream investments at the same time as we support those on the front line.
It doesn't sound like magic to me. It sounds rather obvious. Let's have tough laws to make sure that dangerous people aren't in the community, but good supports that prevent people from becoming dangerous in the first place. We can do all of these things at once. It's just going to take a consistent effort over a significant period of time.