Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his passionate address with respect to a very important issue.
I have three brief questions that would perhaps help the discussion. He pointed out if my memory serves me correctly that 32 people have been killed by 23 individuals who had been paroled. As he indicated, even one death is one too many. Does he know how many overall have been paroled? In other words, these 23 parolees he speaks of are what percentage of all parolees? I do not know if he has that information.
There is another point I want to raise as a question. He indicated a need to improve the system. Of course all colleagues from all parties would agree that that is so. In fact, we made a commitment to do that in our electoral platform and it was repeated again in the speech from the throne.
Is he indicating that better appointments and better rules are necessary? I thought it was a suggestion that appointments would be the main ingredient there.
Finally, I had an independent study group of qualified individuals look at rates of crime in an attempt to see whether or not they correlated with capital punishment. In other words, in countries where there is capital punishment and in those where there is not, was there a correlation between rates of crime? It varied up and down. Sometimes it was yes and sometimes it was no.
I was wondering whether or not the hon. member had any credible studies which showed that if there were to be capital punishment in this country that all of a sudden violence-quite apart from the violence that the state of course would become involved in-would decrease.