My hon. colleague says that is government by opportunism, and that is what it is: if you think you can win a referendum you hold one and you do not call for it when you think you will not win. For example, would this Parliament or the people of Canada be willing to have a referendum on the GST or unemployment insurance or other difficult issues?
The Reform member spoke about keeping horrible murderers in prison at public expense. When we take the total number of inmates and divide it into the total cost of our prison system, it comes to about $50,000 or $60,000 a year for the most serious criminals. I know Reform members understand arithmetic. This does not mean that if one criminal is executed we would save $60,000, because there are fixed costs in the system. If we are really going to save money we would have to execute about 100 criminals a year, I would surmise. Then we could close a prison. Most of our prisons hold about 300 or 400 inmates. If we were really going to save any money we would execute about 100 a year to save a decent amount of money. If we were to start doing that we would rank with the Republic of China in executions. The countries that led the world recently in executions were South Africa and China. We would join that select club if we were to simply execute people to save money.
If we in the House are really serious about protecting the public from violent crime then we have to concentrate on preventive measures, concentrate on measures directed to the causes of violent crime. Capital punishment is a measure to be applied after the murder has taken place. It is a post factum penalty. Penalties are necessary in our criminal law. As I said, we should not have this extreme penalty because of the many objections to it. While penalties are necessary, they will not solve the crime problem. We will solve the crime problem by concentrating on measures to prevent crime and measures directed at the causes of crime.
In conclusion, we cannot convince a society that it is wrong to take a life when the state is ready and willing to take lives.
There are many more arguments and many more aspects to this debate, but we cannot cover them all in 10 minutes.