Madam Speaker, I am pleased to be able to represent the people of Elk Island on this important debate. I would like to begin by saying that it is quite inappropriate of us to have a committee arbitrarily say that the member for Calgary East who proposes the motion has the right to bring it to the House for a one hour debate after which it is dropped.
There is a committee that has said we cannot even vote on this bill. I want to be on record as saying that I strongly object to it. I believe that on an issue of importance like this one it is totally appropriate for us to be able to express our opinions on it. At the end of the debate process we should all be given the opportunity to say whether or not we favour the measure.
If the Liberals are against it, let them stand and say that they are against it. Let them say that they will continue allowing people to be attacked in their homes and have their property removed while they are out. That is atrocious. I would like to see them stand and say that to Canadians across the country.
I would like to speak for a few minutes about the whole system of justice and the idea of break and enters. I wish to emphasize that we need to do better right across the country in building into our youth when they are young a strong sense of morality, a strong sense of what is right and what is wrong.
What has happened in the country? We actually have young people and even adults who think that they are doing nothing wrong when they walk into another person's property with the intent of removing property, whether or not the people are there. Where did that come from?
I remember growing up in Saskatchewan many decades ago when we did not even have a lock on the door of our farmhouse. My dad used to say that someone could come by when we are not home and need to use our phone. We left the house open so that if people came by to use the phone they could.
There was no fear that someone would take our furniture. Maybe we were so poor the furniture was not worth taking, I do not know, but it was probably as good as someone else's down the road. We did not worry about those things in those days because there was a built-in sense of morality and community. We cared for each other and we would not in any way steal from one another. We have lost the sense that it is wrong to take someone else's property. Somehow in our society that built-in sense of morality has evaporated.
I remember when I was the chairman of the Strathcona Christian Academy, a new private school that we started. I was involved in writing our first handbook. We patterned it after handbooks in other schools. There was an instruction in one of the handbooks which said that students should not bring valuable property to school because of the danger of it being stolen. We added in our book, and I am very proud that I was part of the construction of that book, notwithstanding that students should be careful what kind of property they bring to school, we expected them not to take things which were not theirs even if the temptation presented itself. We made that very clear because in our school we taught more than academics. We taught respect for one another and respect for property.
I wish that we would have strong schools, strong churches and strong families that would pass that sense of morality on to the next generation so that this epidemic of break and enters and stealing would come to an end. It is atrocious that we have allowed it to happen.
I would also say that in no small way I attribute the onslaught of violence to all the sorts of things that have been on television over the years. I read somewhere that by the time a student graduates from grade 12 he or she has observed an average of 18,000 murders on television. How could we then be surprised when students grow up and simply act out what they have been taught all their lives, that it is okay to do that? There is something fundamentally wrong. We have lost the handle.
That is step one. We should train our young people so that as they become adults they are responsible and respectful citizens who do not abuse other people and their property.
Lo and behold, some people make mistakes. What should we do with a first time offender? The bill that my colleague has put forward does not deal with first time offenders. He is talking about repeat offenders. What do we do with a first time offender?
My brother-in-law would be very happy if I were to mention a program he has worked with. He was involved in the justice system in a provinces I will not identify. He worked hard as a volunteer in what was called restorative justice.
There are a lot of young people who just simply make a mistake. They bow to peer pressure or whatever. They with their friends break into a place and take things that are not theirs. It is a genuine error. Those young people are retrievable. Those young people can be shown, taught and corrected.
I do not believe putting young people in jail at that stage is as good as what my brother-in-law and his wife did. They worked with couples and young people. They also worked with families whose homes were broken into. In conjunction with the justice system in the province, they brought the offender and the offended together.
I remember my brother-in-law saying that one young person said that doing six months in jail was nothing compared to having to look the person in the eye whose house the individual broke into and finally saying sorry that he or she had made a mistake.
The next stage then is restitution. The young people stole something that was not theirs. Now it becomes their responsibility to restore the property that was stolen. Those young people, having faced the victim and having restored the things, are much less likely to reoffend. This is statistically proven. Generally, we do not teach people to not reoffend by putting them into jail. I personally am in favour of that kind of restorative justice at the early stages of young people's lives before they become hardened criminals.
This bill talks about repeat offenders. If the young person has failed to learn the principles of respect before the first offence and, having gone through the restorative process or whatever is chosen for the first offence, has still failed to learn, now the law has a responsibility to restrain and to protect innocent victims. The member is talking about the sentence for a repeat offender, the one who did not learn it in the first place, who did it once, still did not learn and did it again.
There was a case in Edmonton where a group of thieves were found. In a one week period, while on probation, they broke into 80 homes. What a busy week they had. Are they incorrigible? I venture to say they need to have some time to think about it. A minimum of two years would not be too much for them to admit they were on the wrong track.
I remember also the grievous case in Edmonton of Barb Danelsko, a young mother. She and her family were sleeping upstairs in their house. She heard a noise downstairs. She thought the dog wanted to go out. Dogs do that in the middle of the night. They say “Please, master, let me out. I have some need to go outside.” She went downstairs. Lo and behold there were three youngsters there. Before they left, that young mother was dead. They attacked her with a kitchen knife when she came down. She was not expecting invaders in her house at that time of the night. They prevented her from seeing her children grow up. They deprived those children of their mother and her husband of his wife.
I simply want to say that we need to make sure that those who have not learned the lesson are restrained. A mandatory minimum two year sentence is the minimum that we can do to show those people that if they have not learned the lesson after the first offence, then this is what will happen. We as a society will take the measures necessary to remove them from society because we deserve to be protected.
I urge the government to rethink its decision on whether or not we should vote on the motion. We really should get this thing going because it is a necessary step.