Mr. Speaker, this government has made a unilateral decision to tax a Canadian family of four and to give those tax funds to a minuscule proportion of youth. This government is not being overly compassionate or considerate toward youth. It is merely taking from the family to create a memorial for the Prime Minister.
I will now move on to a couple of areas of concern to my constituents. This government promised to spend $30 million on crime prevention. It has been having difficulty even maintaining the status quo. In my community the officer in charge of the Surrey RCMP detachment has lost a number of his more experienced officers to other police forces and other agencies. Why? Because it took until last Friday for this government to finally provide a pay raise so that these officers could feed and clothe their children.
This government was more concerned with looking after government executives than it was with those who were in more dire financial straits. Now that it has finally brought in the pay raise it may well be too late and may not be enough.
Instead of keeping its commitment to maintain the salaries of its national police force in line with the average salary of the major municipal forces, this government has merely thrown them a bone. There is little meat involved. Many other officers from my community may be forced to move onto greener pastures. It is unfortunate.
This government has so much difficulty with its priorities that it fails to properly look after those who toil to preserve the peace in our communities, our police officers. The former minister of justice and the former solicitor general were promising $30 million for crime prevention all the way back to 1996, but little has been seen. When it comes it will again likely be for a political purpose rather than being in the best interest of our citizens.
I will provide another example of the dreadful mismanagement of this government. It is all hoopla and little action. The former solicitor general was quite proud of the RCMP for introducing its violent crime linkage analysis system, or ViCLAS, a project to monitor and solve crimes of a serial nature. It has been said that if the system had been properly used during the Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka investigation the murders of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy may never have occurred.
Guess what? The province of Ontario has learned its lesson. It has managed to allocate sufficient but scarce resources to properly fund ViCLAS through the operations of the Ontario Provincial Police. But where is the federal government with the RCMP? I have been led to understand that the RCMP ViCLAS project is now under severe threat because this government has not found or made available the necessary resources to properly fund this worthwhile and world-recognized program.
Imagine, the RCMP is forced to fly the Prime Minister to the ski hills but the government does not have enough money to fund one of the world's most advanced technological crime fighting tools. As with most things, this government is more concerned with trumpeting and taking credit for the program. It is not interested in providing the funds to operate it efficiently or effectively.
With that thought I will end my comments on this bill.