Mr. Speaker, it appears the member opposite wants to get into a shouting contest. I am for that if he wants to do that. When I was talking about considering the military I was talking about enforcing the law.
The member talks so piously about protecting his constituents. That member's government has turned its back on law enforcement. The RCMP clearly defined the areas of smuggling to the government. Unfortunately those areas happened to be primarily on reserve land on the border between the U.S. and Canada, but this government has a hands off policy for the reserves. If there is criminal activity anywhere in this country it should be addressed to the full extent of the law. Apparently this government has special areas where it does not want to enforce the law. I wonder what the reason is for that.
The government says it does not have enough money to patrol the areas of cigarette smuggling. That is the excuse it uses. It says: "You in the Reform Party are talking about spending money for law enforcement". We would be prepared to do that.
I suggested to the hon. member last week on the same subject that if the government does not have enough money to put more police officers in that area, then why not use the military? The government is having a problem in defining the role for the military. I was not talking about a military invasion. I was talking about orderly patrol to stop smugglers from coming across the border. There is a whole lot of difference between that and sending in the tanks and the bazookas that the hon. member is talking about. He tends to continue to blow things out of proportion, but we can disseminate the verbiage coming from the other side.
I talked about higher export taxes on cigarettes. I support that. I will stand by that proposition. I believe that instead of lowering the taxes on cigarettes in Canada to combat smuggling the government should have made the price of the product at the source more expensive so there would not be such a huge profit margin. I know the government could have received the co-operation of the United States.
It all goes back to whether this government has any backbone to enforce the laws that currently exist in Canada. The answer to that is no. It has chosen a back door method which is going to cause considerably more problems to Canada's health care system, instead of standing up and enforcing the laws like it should have. This government has no guts when it comes to enforcing the law. We will not see it in the next four years no matter what the justice minister says. This is evidence of what is to come.