Mr. Speaker, I did warn you that you would probably hear from me twice today.
The government has argued it is far too costly to take DNA samples at the time of the arrest of somebody who has been previously convicted.
It amazes me. It has indicated it will not support this amendment which would enable the police to take these samples at the time of arresting someone with a previous conviction.
It says it is too costly and yet it is prepared to spend perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars on registering the guns of law-abiding people like farmers who will never do anything wrong. It will not spend money on building a DNA bank which would solve crimes and therefore save enormous amounts of money in terms of property damage and personal harm done by criminals.
Where is the sense in wasting all that money on law-abiding citizens when there is absolutely no reason to do it and not spending the money where it is required in crime control?
This government is happy to give the Minister of Canadian Heritage millions of dollars to blow away on a flag program and millions of dollars to throw away on a heritage calendar which mentions every ethnic religious holiday one can think of except for Christmas and New Year, but it will not spend the money to help build a DNA databank which would help us solve crimes.
The government will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council which gives grants to professors which appear to be awfully like vacations but it will not give money to build a DNA bank that would help solve crimes for ordinary Canadians.
I was looking at some of the grants of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. There was one for a woman to go to a little island just west of Fiji, a tax haven island. She was going for three years to study housing on this island. It is an absolutely ridiculous waste of money for a person to be given money to do that under the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grants.
These organizations give away money to study the make-up of blueberry jam. The member for Langley—Abbotsford has mentioned that one before. What a lot of rubbish. This is money just poured down the drain on useless, idiotic projects when we have here an opportunity to build a DNA bank that would actually make a difference. It would actually provide a deterrent, would enable the police to actually solve crimes and would relieve the suffering of many law-abiding Canadians.
The Liberals absolutely love spending money on all sorts of social engineering but they hate spending money on crime control or solving crimes. They are completely out of step with the public.
On another aspect of this bill, the government constantly talks about the court test of the legislation. It is so terrified of the court and what the court might do that it has become hog tied. It is unable to produce reasonable legislation because it is so afraid of the supreme court.
There was a clause put into the charter of rights called the notwithstanding clause and it was put there for a reason. It was put there so that notwithstanding the rulings of the courts, if the government felt that a ruling had been made out of step with the will of parliament and the will of the people the notwithstanding clause could be used to correct that problem.
Instead of being so afraid of these judges who defy the will of parliament and the will of the people and spending enormous amounts of money on preparing bills to be charter safe, why not use the notwithstanding clause a few times and show the judges what we expect of them?
We can have the public confirm the decision of the government by putting it to a binding referendum on the public will so that the government then cannot act in a tyrannical manner. If it does use the notwithstanding clause it will be endorsed by the public.
If we continue down this road of constantly talking about making bills charter safe, we surely know from our own experience in life that for every lawyer who says they drew up a document free of challenge and there is no way anyone can challenge this, there is another lawyer across the street who says it is full of loopholes and can be challenged from every direction.
We can have all the experts in committee who can make these suggestions on how we can make bills charter safe, but there is always going to be a lawyer out there who will study that bill and find some loophole or some clause where he can take it to challenge and with perseverance will mock it down. It happens all the time.
It is time we made it clear that we will no longer tolerate that as a society, that we need some crime control, and that if the judges will not help us with that project we will use the notwithstanding clause to ensure they carry out the public will and begin to reflect a little of what society wants instead of what lawyers want.
Notwithstanding the comments of the member for Scarborough—Rouge River when he spoke earlier that there is nothing to stop the taking of DNA samples under warrant, when we look at the amendment being proposed by Reform we could have this amendment and still have the taking of samples by warrant if necessary. This motion gives an opportunity to begin building a DNA bank for repeat offenders so that we can solve some of the crimes they commit. I cannot understand why anyone would oppose that.
The member mentioned again that they are worried about charter challenges. Everything in this place is done worrying about what the courts might do to it. It is just completely crippling us, preventing us from doing our job.
Let us pass this motion. Let us add it into the bill and let us worry about what the court does with it a little later.