Mr. Speaker, the freedom to protest takes many forms. The freedom to protest is limited like every other freedom. Every freedom has a reasonable limit. When protesters in Quebec City started to tear down fences and break windows, they should have been arrested and charged. They should have been convicted and sentenced, if in fact they were guilty of those crimes. I want to make that very clear. No freedom is unlimited. There are reasonable limits to all of them.
Instead of introducing new limits on freedom, what should happen is that security forces of various kinds should be given enough resources to enforce the laws that presently exist.
We do not need more and more laws that restrict our freedoms. We need adequate resources to enforce the ones we have. We made that argument in the past about Bill C-68 and other pieces of legislation. No law by itself will stop people from doing things if they have criminal intent. What will stop criminals is more police on the beat, more security and more intelligence gathering. All those things can stop criminals but just passing laws does nothing in and of itself.
When we are confronted with something like the APEC protest or the Quebec City protest, the issue is getting more police out there to ensure that people can protest peacefully and have their say about things, but the moment they step over the line, trespass on property or vandalize, that is when the police should step in and do their job.
One of the best examples of how well that can work is in New York City pre-September 11. Members will remember that when Rudolph Giuliani was elected as the mayor of New York City quite a while ago it was in a state of turmoil because there was a tremendous amount of crime. Mr. Giuliani said that if he were elected he would hire more police and put more cops on the beat. He did that.
They started charging people for crimes already on the books. Graffiti artists were arrested and charged. They cracked down on crime. They cracked down on those who were harassing people on the street. They cracked down on petty vandalism.
As a result, not only did they deal with petty crime but the violent crime rate dropped like a stone. That is the point. Making new laws will not fix everything, but if police are on the beat to enforce the laws it makes a huge difference. We know that empirically. Common sense tells us that.
For a long time in my own community we were battling to get a proper number of RCMP officers. The federal government had cut back funding to the RCMP. We had a situation where a lot of new people had come to town and the crime rate went up. Since we brought more police into the community my understanding is that things have stabilized. I do not know that crime is going down, but it certainly is not rising the way it was previously.
We are grateful the government is finally starting to put a bit more money into justice after listening to the Canadian Alliance. I guess it started to realize that perhaps it is not such a bad investment after all to put money into these things.
My point is simple. We should not assume that by creating new laws, and perhaps even violating some of the fundamental freedoms in which we believe so strongly, somehow some of the problems with crime will end. It will not happen. We need reinforcement. I conclude by saying that the government's first role has to be the security of the liberty of people.
In fact a lot of people would argue that the security of people's liberties should be the government's overwhelming and overriding role. What does that mean? It does not just mean securing their personal safety, as critical as that is, it also means securing all their fundamental rights, including the right not to have their lives interfered with by their own government.
While we are in this period where we are all concerned about threats from outside the country, we should also be alive to the danger of interference within the country from our own government.