Well, thank you, Mr. Chair.
As I was saying, the police officer told me about the fact that the courts have made it increasingly difficult to prove that somebody has stolen the car, so he said in all of these cases, the individual was found driving a stolen vehicle and was charged with being in possession of stolen property. There was no doubt in the police officer's mind that this individual had, in fact, stolen the vehicle; however, the individual was never charged with stealing the vehicle, because, as I was informed by the police officer, the way the court system works is that being in possession of the car that is stolen does not prove the fact that you stole the car. Very often there is video evidence of this, but again, the police officer said that was difficult to use in court, so there are probably a number of things that the minister could do to make sure this type of thing could happen.
I have had many constituents reach out to me over stolen vehicles, like the business owner who owns a business right across the street from my constituency office. He had a Nissan Armada. Now, a Nissan Armada is quite a rare vehicle in Canada—a very rare vehicle in northern Alberta. He also had aftermarket wheels on that Nissan Armada, which made it an even more unique vehicle. There are likely very few in our county or in my hometown. I don't know of another Nissan Armada, and the fact that he put aftermarket wheels on it makes it very identifiable. That vehicle was stolen. Folks broke into his house, stole the keys off the kitchen counter, went into his garage and stole both of his vehicles out of his garage. He subsequently found a Nissan Armada on Kijiji that looked like his and had the same aftermarket wheels that he had. He approached the police to say, “Hey, I found my Nissan Armada on the Internet here for sale. Could you go retrieve it?” He was told that they did not have the resources to do that and that he should just deal with his insurance company to get a new Nissan Armada. These are the stories that we have to deal with.
The other thing I point out is around the security systems. It's fascinating to think that in Alberta, the number one vehicle stolen is a Ford pickup. An interesting thing about it is that, I think up until about 2006, the Ford pickups—the diesel pickups, anyway—did not have an immobilizer system on them from the factory, so they get stolen a lot more because they don't have that immobilizer system on them, like what are termed the “2nd-Gen Cummins” pickups. Many of them do not have what's called a SKIM program on them—sentry key immobilizer module is what SKIM stands for—so those vehicles are stolen more often.
In northern Alberta, auto theft looks different from in Toronto or Montreal, given the fact that, most often, auto thefts happen in our neighbourhood in connection with other crimes. Folks steal a vehicle to then go steal fuel, copper, batteries—all these kinds of things. Often, when these vehicles are retrieved, they're either burnt on a side road somewhere or they're found run out of fuel. Many times, if they're found with the folks in them, they will often arrest the person, and there will be batteries, copper and fuel in the box of the pickup as well.
I also have experienced it in my hometown. A Ford one-ton pickup was stolen, and they backed it through the front window of the jewellery store and made off with several thousand dollars' worth of jewellery. The vehicles that are being stolen are being used in the commission of other crimes. All of this goes back, though, to the fact that in 2017 the Liberals changed the bail system, and that has led to a crime wave across northern Alberta. As I pointed out earlier, for the one individual the police officer showed me the file of, most of those crimes had—