Mr. Speaker, today we are debating yet another of the bills the justice minister is trying to rush through the House before an election call at the end of the month.
Suddenly the justice minister has decided that he should look like he is doing something to give justice to Canadians. That is good. One wonders why it has to happen just before an election, before the justice minister is going to the voters.
In any event, here we are debating the fourth or fifth justice bill that is supposed to go through the House in a very short period of time. Bill C-55 is an act to amend the Criminal Code with respect to high risk offenders.
If there is a high risk that a criminal or an offender, if released back into society, will harm or violently reoffend, then this bill is supposed to protect society from that person by ensuring that he or she is not released back into society until no longer a high risk offender.
The original Bill C-55 was not very effective in this, therefore the justice minister is trotting up once more to strengthen it. It would be good if he succeeded. Unfortunately, as usual, a timid half measure is being trotted out, is being aggressively sold and marketed as a substantial move forward to give Canadians the protection that our society needs and is not getting.
It is up to Reform, as usual, to point out how misleading and how ineffective these measures are. It becomes a marketing battle where the Liberals and the justice minister say "we sure got tough on crime, you are a lot safer with us".
It is up to the opposition to point out how ineffective and how unsubstantial these changes are that are being sold as the real goods. As a well known commercial says, where's the beef? There is precious little in so many of these measures.
Yet if we do not support them, the minister then turns around and in a very politically crass way writes letters to the newspapers saying Reform has voted against his wonderful measures to protect people, failing to mention that these are not wonderful measures at all and do not deserve anybody's support at least not most Canadians'.
Here we are with Bill C-55. It is very interesting because Bill C-55, as members know from some of the speeches and interventions of my colleagues, does not apply to a whole list of violent criminals and certain people who are dangerous to society.
Specifically, it does not apply to those who prey on our children, who are sexual predators and who are pedophiles. This is a very interesting omission because it could so easily not have been an omission and because our debate on this bill follows very closely on the heels of our debate yesterday on Bill C-27.
Bill C-27, as is so typical with Liberal bills, puts a lot of hearts and flowers into the preamble, which of course has no legal effect but always plays the violin as to how the Liberals are so concerned about the safety of Canadians. Then the measures that follow do little or nothing to really follow up substantively on that concern.
In the preamble to Bill C-27 the first two paragraphs provide a general context and affirm Parliament's concern about violence against women and children in the areas addressed by the bill, acknowledging children's heightened vulnerability to and greater need for protection from exploitation and abuse.
Paragraph 6 of the preamble recalls Canada's undertaking in ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to protect children from and prevent their sexual exploitation and abuse.
Paragraph 8 of the preamble expresses Parliament's wish in the interest of promoting the life, liberty and security of women and other victims of criminal harassment to strongly denounce that offence by strengthening the law in relation to it.
Here we have some nice Liberal rhetoric about the need to protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation. What do we have the very next day? We have a bill concerning criminals who are known sexual predators, who are dangerous to the safety of our children, who could be kept indefinitely out of society to protect our children, and these people are totally missing from the list of offenders who can be designated dangerous offenders under Bill C-55.
We have to ask why that would be when there is a lot lip service paid to protecting our children. In the very next bill that could protect our children from sexual predators and from people who are very likely to reoffend, and since we know that individuals falling into this category are a danger to our children, why on earth does Bill C-55 fail to ensure that these individuals can be kept out of society and protect our children from them? I have been told, and I am sure Liberal members and the Liberal justice minister know, that there is no known cure for pedophilia.
Not only does the bill omit that category of offender, but we have introduced an amendment to correct this oversight. That is very kind of Reform, I would say. It is doing our job in a constructive way to make sure that the stated objectives of the Liberal justice minister and the Liberal government to protect society are actually carried out. We have done the responsible thing.
I would like Canadians to watch very carefully when it comes time to vote on this amendment to include sexual predators and those who exploit our children in the list of people who can be kept indefinitely incarcerated under the dangerous offender provisions of Bill C-55. I am willing to bet that the Liberals will not put that in the bill. They will vote against the Reform amendment. But during the election they are going to play the violin and say "boy, do we ever care about protecting children". When push comes to shove and they could protect children, that is not in the bill and they will not even support an amendment to put it in.
I get pretty tired of seeing letters like the one printed in the Richmond News on March 23 where the justice minister has the gall to say: ``We're really trying to protect this society but Reform won't support us''. I guess not with this kind of hypocrisy and nonsense.
The hearts and flowers, the preamble, the nice stuff that is written at the beginning of these bills everyone would agree with. What Canadians need to do is look at the substance of these bills and see if there is any beef in them. Nine times out of ten there is none.