Mr. Speaker, I know the member for Notre-Dame-de-GrĂ¢ce has a great deal of experience in this matter having served as Solicitor General of the country.
He describes to us the American system which most of us regard with a considerable amount of concern and is obviously not providing a sensible solution by building more prisons and having longer sentences. It seems to be an infernal industry in the United States. They create the crime. They create the crime chasers and then they create the incarceration. There is no end to it.
The member gave a very cogent description of the problems in Florida and the juxtaposition of a death penalty in the morning and a murder in the afternoon. I understand his point about the lack of deterrence.
We also have the problem of the Canadian public desperately trying to understand what we can do. In our inner cities today we are confronted with serious problems. In my own riding of Rosedale I have serious problems in downtown Toronto. At a time 15 years ago gunshots did not ricochet off downtown buildings. Now there are women and children who are afraid to walk around at night in parts of downtown Toronto. It is no good to say we will seize all the guns. Admittedly that is a start but only a start. There will always be guns there.
Has the member found another model? Does he know of somewhere else? Is there some other model that he can draw to our attention from the depth of his experience that we could be looking at, something concrete to which we as Canadians can turn to address the problem of the violence that is getting worse in our inner cities and not react in the American way?