Mr. Speaker, it is entirely typical of my colleague, a former policeman, to have dug into the facts, to have brought the issues to light and to have demonstrated them to the House in such a manner.
The member raises the whole issue of public safety that I was attempting to get at. The whole issue of public safety revolves around the need for people to be certain about who is in the community and can cause them harm. How can we know who and where these people? If we do not know these dangerous people are locked up, then we still live under the threat of their reoffending.
This relates to the whole attitude of government. I suppose it is based upon the philosophy that a person is not really responsible for what he does: if a person's mother is a prostitute and their father an alcoholic, how can anyone blame them for anything? However, we all have known since we have been conscious that there is a difference between right and wrong. We all know what a bad conscience is. We all know the inner voice that speaks to us. Yet there has been a deliberate attempt to move the inner conscience away, to tell people that they are not responsible: "Poor little you. How could you possibly be responsible when you have had such a miserable past?"
I am not suggesting that people who had a difficult childhood should not be given consideration. It is our intention that all Canadians should have the opportunity to come to their full potential and do what they truly choose to do. However, when someone chooses to commit murder, there must be some means of saying that it is not acceptable and we will not allow them to continue to do that. They must realize that they are responsible for their actions no matter what happened to them as a child or what circumstances brought them to that point.