Good afternoon, members of the committee, members of Parliament, and the other witnesses called upon to speak on rural crime today.
My name is Nick Cornea, and I am the founder and president of Farmers Against Rural Crime, a Facebook page that I started up in February to bring awareness and to push for changes on rural crime in western Canada.
I may find it hard to keep this to a 10-minute introduction, but I am here today as one voice for the 17,500 members who I have on my page from coast to coast.
I am a father of two and a third-generation farmer on a farm near Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. We live near two large populated areas, Moose Jaw and Regina. Living near these populated areas, we face the challenges of rural crime on a daily basis.
Over the last eight months since this page was created, I have received hundreds upon hundreds of stories from people all over Canada about crime in their area. Their first-hand experiences with the struggles of handling theft, financially and emotionally, are second to none. Some of the stories that have been told to me would break most people's hearts.
These are stories of families who show their children where to hide in their house so that if thieves do break into their house, their children can be safe. They come home from the school bus and have to run from their lane up into the yard into the house and lock the doors. There are stories of people who put an eight-foot chain-link fence with razor wire around their house. They all have an automatic opener for the gate to get into their house. They drive their vehicle in and they close the gate. They then hit their garage door opener, open the garage door, drive in, close the garage door, and then unlock their house. That's how bad some areas are in northern Saskatchewan.
Victims are losing not only material goods but also livestock, pets, and lately even a large Clydesdale horse to thieves wanting to make a quick buck.
I have also heard the issues with response times of police. In rural western Canada, even though we may only be a 20- to 30-minute drive from the nearest detachment, the response time of an officer may be hours or even days to get out to our locations. This leaves us as sitting ducks for criminals to come out, get what they want, and leave. We are then left frightened, alone and fearing we may have to defend ourselves, which will make us into a criminal and no longer the victim, as we have seen with the Maurice family in Okotoks, Alberta.
In Saskatchewan we have also seen an increase in young offenders doing the crimes. Some young offenders in the last few months as young as 11 years old were involved in breaking and entering and theft of motor vehicles. My group has made an outcry to have the age of the Youth Criminal Justice Act reduced to the age of 14 to 15. These teenagers know what they are doing and how to do it, and they do know the crime on their record will be expunged once they turn 18. The lifetime criminals also know this, and they use this to their advantage.
In conclusion, the vast majority of our group would like to see changes in the Youth Criminal Justice Act, stiffer penalties to the criminals to stop that revolving door from turning, and restitution for loss of goods as well as for insurance premiums, because not only are our possessions stolen, but we then have to pay a deductible to get them back. Then, in turn, the insurance company raises our premiums to get the money back for the money they have given us.
We'd like to see faster response time for police and RCMP. Stationing one or two officers in every small community would probably help the situation. It might not fix it, but it would definitely help it.
We would also like to see funding for mental health of the victims, victims who suffer from anxiety and other issues stemming from the crime on their property.
I have one story in particular of a 26-year-old woman who farms and ranches with a neighbour. Over the years, she has been saving her money from working on the neighbouring ranch. She saves money from every paycheque. She goes to the local livestock auction and buys one or two head of bred heifers, brings them back to her place and tries to grow her herd. Her end goal is that she wants to make a sustainable future for herself and her family.
She's been broken into six times in the last four years—four in the last two years. One time in particular when she came home, all her doors were open, her dogs were outside and her fences were left open. She was scared and didn't go in. She went back to work and called her father and her boss. They went to check out the house. When she arrived after they said the coast was clear, she walked into complete devastation. TVs were ripped off the walls and stolen. They had literally jumped through the drywall, destroying the house from end to end. Not only did they hurt her financially, but they hurt her emotionally by stealing her underwear drawer to take with them as a prized possession or some kind of trophy.
These are the things that our group would like to see change. We don't want to live our lives in fear, and we don't want to fear for our families. I have a 15-year-old-sister and a 13-year-old brother who help on the farm. When I'm in the field combining or when I'm driving a semi, I don't want to get a radio phone call from my sister or my brother telling me that there's someone in our yard and they don't know what to do.
I know that a lot of you are from urban areas and don't realize that a tractor isn't like a truck or a car. We do 20 kilometres to 30 kilometres an hour down the road in road gear. Also, there is no mechanism to lock the door and generally all our doors are made of glass so that we have a full view of our crop as we're driving, spraying, combining, seeding and doing other tillage work on our farm. I never want to hear that phone call that my sister is being murdered, raped or taken advantage of, because these criminals, once you see their faces, all of a sudden it's fight or flight for them.
I know that we're a long distance apart, but when you're making your findings and doing your report, think of my family. Think of my four-year-old-son, my one-year-old daughter, my 13-year-old brother and my 15-year-old sister and the fear that we have in our area with criminals and theft. It's not only the properties that we're worried about losing—it's our family members.
I'd like to thank you guys for inviting me to be part of this inquiry. I hope that together we can bring forth changes to help combat this epidemic in rural Canada. I always finish on my Facebook page with the slogan of our page: “Be Vigilant and Not Vigilantes”.
Thank you.