Mr. Speaker, I hope we can interpret the hon. member's statement as saying that there may be an amendment to this bill to make it equally applicable to all sectors of society.
My specific question deals with the hon. member's reference to statistics. I do not know how much he knows about the subject. I know a considerable amount because it is part of my background. It is very easy to pull a short section out of a statistical trend and say look, it is rising, it is dropping. If we are going to study a trend we have to study it over a reasonable period of time. I will grant that over the last couple of years there has been a very minor drop in the rate of violent crime in the country. But if we look at the statistics from about 1962 onward we can see many positive and negative blips. There is no such thing as a flat statistic trend.
Then the hard fact of the matter is that the rate of violent crime in Canada since 1962 has increased by almost 400 per cent. I suspect the hon. member knows that. I wish that when he uses statistics he would use them a little more broadly and generously.