Mr. Speaker, I certainly want to add my congratulations and thanks to the hon. member for Mississauga East for her tenacity and courage in continuing this fight and bringing this important debate to the House.
I am also very pleased to see that after the third time this private member's bill has come this far and is going to be votable. We will find out when the vote is held who actually speaks for Canadians and who speaks for victims.
I am actually really restraining myself in my reaction to the speech we just heard. I cannot use the words because they are unparliamentary. It is really deplorable that the frontbench of this government has so little regard for victims in this country.
While I was sitting here listening I thought of the word empathy which means feeling with someone who is hurting. It is different from sympathy. Empathy is feeling with.
Recently I went to Saskatchewan to visit my parents. We drove down a road that we drive every time we come from our home in Alberta down into Swift Current, Saskatchewan where my parents live. When we make a certain corner I always think of a person who died at that corner. That person was Eugene Martens.
He was a rancher who gave part of his farmland in order to put up a camp for children and young people. I attended that camp as a youth and later on as a counsellor. It was one of those situations where a man had a significant influence in my life because of his generosity. He was killed on the corner of highway 4 north of Swift Current because, I believe, of icy roads. It was not because of drunken driving. It was an accident.
Even though this man was not a member of my family, every time I go by that place I think of that person and I say a little prayer of gratitude for his life and for what he did. That helps me to empathize with a person whose family member, a loved one, has had their life taken from them by someone else's negligence or by someone else's misguided and wilful act.
When I think of their pain and how they must hurt it absolutely drives me to distraction to think that there is a government in Ottawa that cannot empathize with those victims. I cannot understand how that can be. All one has to do is try to put oneself into the same situation.
We are dealing with the question of changing the rules for sentencing. How should a criminal who was charged and convicted of committing a serious crime be sentenced?
The present system is that individuals who are charged with more than one crime at a time often get concurrent sentences. That is incredible. One can take a life, or two, three, four or more and at a certain time their sentence starts and they are able to serve all sentences at the same time whether they have killed one person, two, three or eleven, a significant number in this country. It is unconscionable that we allow that to happen.
Our media paid quite a bit of attention to the application of Clifford Olson for eligibility for early parole last summer. I was interviewed by a local person and I said really he should have had 275 years. When we think of each of those victims, if life sentence means 25 years in prison, ll times 25 is 275. Then I said if he behaves, we will let him off after 250. That is not to make light of it in any way. Here are families of victims with an inescapable sense that some of the lives taken do not matter. There is no penalty for them at all.
I am indeed one of those who believe that a life sentence should mean life. It should at least mean 25 years.