He was given one year banishment. He was to go out into a remote area for a year and be counselled by some elders.
I saw an article on that in a Halifax newspaper while going home. By the time I reached Prince George, B.C. it had hit the Prince George Citizen the next day. My phone started ringing off the hook and people were asking me: Is everyone crazy out there?'' I said to them:No, just the Liberals''.
This is the type of justice that Liberals seem to embrace. An individual is responsible for a crime which he or she commits. But Liberals do not believe in placing the responsibility on the individual who commits the crime. No. The Liberal philosophy says that it is society which is to blame. Let us penalize society. Society turned this person that way. They are not to blame.
The fact is there are provisions in the Criminal Code to deal with serious crimes, even the hate crimes which are pointed out in section 718.2. We have penalties on the books now.
I want to get back to sentencing. Section 718.2(c) states:
where consecutive sentences are imposed, the combined sentence should not be unduly long or harsh;
When I read that I see Pierre Elliott Trudeau and I see his former justice minister, the one responsible for section 745. It is the rallying cry of bleeding heart liberalism personified in the bill. Far be it for the courts to suggest that criminals should be punished for a crime.
Many Canadians are wondering about the existence of concurrent sentences. Why should a criminal convicted of several crimes serve his sentences concurrently so that he ends up serving a sentence for only one of the crimes?
This fashion of sentencing, consecutive and concurrent, is the number one contributor to plea bargaining, to deal making outside the courts. The lawyers get together, have a cup of coffee and say: "If you want to play golf this afternoon let's cop a plea and we will get this thing over with".
People read in the paper about someone who has been convicted of a serious crime and got a slap on the wrist. Most times the judge takes a bad rap for that because the lawyers had made the deal outside the courtroom before it even got to the judge. I have a decent enough regard for lawyers. They have to make a living too. We took the bounty off them in our party, Mr. Speaker.
The Liberals have it all wrong in Bill C-41. They are simply reacting to pressure from the interest groups which supported them during the election. The Liberals are famous for that. Mr. Trudeau probably did the best job at gathering together people from different categories and from different groups so that when the election came along they did not have to start talking to people individually, they just talked to the leaders and the rest of the people followed behind.
Our country is on a dangerous path. We would be negligent as parliamentarians if we dared to forget that the people of Canada have a right to decide what kind of society they want to live in. As long as the government refuses to listen to a broad spectrum of the Canadian people to hear their ideas and concerns, then anything it attempts to do with the criminal justice system is going to serve only the people who support it.
This is the underlying purpose of the bill. It is not to try to address crime in a meaningful way, but rather to placate the special interest groups that are giving the government a lot of problems right now.
I cannot in any way support a bill like this. I have had probably in excess of 15,000 pieces of mail from my riding all saying: "You are our member of Parliament for Prince George-Bulkley Valley. We implore you to vote against Bill C-41 particularly against section 718.2" which attempts to categorize certain types of crime based on the categories that the Liberal Party wants there.
In response to the people who sent me here to represent them I will most assuredly vote against Bill C-41 and comply with the wishes of my constituents, something that the party opposite is not able to do.
Let me rephrase that. In all fairness there are members of the party opposite, and I apologize to them publicly now, who have had the guts to stand up and say, I am going to represent my constituency. That is what I was sent here to do. That is what I am going to do. I congratulate them and I condemn the whip. I condemn the Prime Minister for the things he has said about the people who have had the guts to stand up and vote in a democratic fashion representing their constituents.