Mr. Speaker, the member for Yellowhead refers to the hate provisions in the bill, which I very strongly support and which the majority of my colleagues in the Liberal caucus support.
He says he does not understand how judges could tell if a crime was motivated by hate. Let me suggest that if the Heritage Front, or the neo-Nazis were to attack a visible minority group, and say they want to keep this country white, it is a pretty good bet that we are talking about hate.
I really wish that the issues of crime and punishment and justice were as simplistic as the Reform would like to believe. When the parliamentary secretary asked for constructive amendments we got capital punishment, corporal punishment, longer sentences, more jails.
Those things do not work. They have not worked. That is what is so important for the members of the Reform Party to get their minds around.
The things they are talking about have been tried and are being practised in societies like the United States. They were practised in all the repressive regimes in the history of mankind. They have not worked. There is unanimous agreement among people who know the complexities, as well as victims, as well as volunteers in the system, on what has worked.
When I raised the issue before, one of the Reform members said that it was an elitist kind of idea as well as an inexperienced kind of idea. It is so clear that it is not just the experts. It is people in the community who have any involvement, be it with victims, be it with offenders. They are saying the present approach is not working.
The direction this bill sets in place was what was tabled by the committee on justice on crime prevention and community safety which had victim groups agreeing with it, which had professionals in the system agreeing with it, which had police officers agreeing with it.
The member mentioned that he has one of the lowest crime rates in his community. The community I come from, the Waterloo region, has one of the lowest crime rates in Canada. We have a task force called the crime prevention and community safety task force. It is headed by the regional chief of police, Larry Graville. The police officers on that committee are the ones who pushed the strongest for new approaches because they said that the old methods have not worked. We have to look beyond just enforcement, we have to look at the root causes of crime.
The issues are not ones that are going to be solved simplistically. The old approaches, the approaches that are practised in the United States where some states have capital punishment and sentencing which goes back hundreds of years, where they incarcerate more people than anybody else in the free world and they have the worst crime rate in the free world. They do not compare to Canada. The only thing we receive from the Americans is all of the television news that shows how violent their society is.
I say to the members of the Reform Party: Do not pander to those misconceptions. If they insist on doing that, all they are going to be doing is fueling crime. People will believe that their communities are not as safe as they are. Let me say that our communities are a lot safer than they are in the United States. If we were to undertake some of these reforms we could go further. We could go toward the European model.
Therefore the answer is not simplicity. The answer is trying to understand and deal with the complexity of the issue.