Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise and to speak in support of the motion.
As we heard from my colleague from Kootenay—Columbia, we have heard many statistics, many studies and many comments, and those certainly have their place in the debate. It gives us some kind of an indication of the scope of the problem when we refer to numbers. Unfortunately, numbers tend to make things cold and impersonal. Human lives are reduced to numbers through statistics. We can never lose sight of the human element in the debate.
I would like to just take a bit of time to make a few comments on my personal experiences with some of these issues.
I recall back to November 4, 1992 when I was watching the evening news in B.C. There was a report about a double homicide in Cloverdale, B.C., which is a community in my city of Surrey. As the report unfolded, we knew that two women had been murdered. That developed over the next couple of days. I recall a couple of days later seeing on the news again a gentleman who was red eyed and crying. He was the father of one of the women.
Unfortunately, I and my family were recoiling at that time from a very specific traumatizing incident two weeks prior to that. I had the man's name so I took it upon myself to find his number and call him. I told him if he ever wanted to talk to let me know. It is an awful way to meet people but Bob and Pat are now among some of my closest friends.
As the story developed, those two women, and I will not name them, shared a house in Cloverdale. One lived downstairs in her basement suite with her three children and one lived upstairs by herself. A gentleman friend of the upstairs tenant paid her a visit. An argument developed over something and eventually he pulled out a knife and stabbed her. The lady in the basement, not knowing what was going on, went upstairs to see what all the ruckus was about. He stabbed her on his way out. The lady upstairs died instantly. The lady downstairs managed to make it out to the street.
The other element in this is that the lady downstairs had three children. Two of those kids were in school that day and that is where they found out what happened to their mother. The four year old was at home and saw the whole thing.
This is how this ties into the debate. When the case was investigated and was before the court, it was discovered that the gentleman friend was stoned on cocaine. He used the defence of cocaine psychosis. In other words, he said he blacked out and did not know what he was doing. Two minutes later there were two women dead as he ran out of the house.
My friend talked about our generation. There was a song by a group back in the sixties called I Got Stoned and I Missed It . I do not buy that kind of defence. We could get into a whole debate about what is an adequate or acceptable defence for killing people and whether cocaine or alcohol intoxication is valid, but that is a debate for another day.
The point is two women are dead, three children are without a mother and one of those children will be completely traumatized for the rest of his life because at four years old he saw his mother stabbed to death. All because of what? Cocaine, an illicit drug. That is part of the human side.
Members in this place have quite frequently heard me talk about how I like to ride along with the RCMP in my community of Surrey. I encourage all members to do the same, not just to have a cup of coffee with them for an hour and talk shop, but to get in the right-hand seat of a police cruiser and spend 12 or 14 hours overnight on a Friday or Saturday. These are usually pretty good nights to find out what goes on in the streets. I try to do that every couple of months with my detachment.
I have had a couple of experiences. It tends to be fairly routine most nights but every once in a while something comes along. I recall one time about a year and a half ago when we got a call very early in the evening about a shoplifter in a supermarket. When we responded to the call the security guard was holding a woman in her mid-thirties with no identification who had stolen three cans of Enfalac, baby formula, a hand puppet and a few little things.
As we questioned her we found out that her welfare cheque had not come and there was no food in the house for the baby. When the officer ran her name through police records he discovered she was on probation and was not supposed to be within 100 metres of the store. She was in breach of her probation.
What could the officer do? Where was the baby? The baby was at the drug recovery house where the mother had been living for nine months. The woman's husband was minding the baby. He was able to visit on weekends because he lived in another drug recovery house.
What could we do? Did the police officer breach her, which means take her to jail right away? No, he did not. He tried to help her and give her a break. The woman was taken to the house where the father, himself a recovering drug addict, was with the six month old child.
The police officer wrote her up and made her promise to appear at the police station the following morning and to appear in court about a month later. He lectured her. I gave her a piece of my mind and told her she was not doing her baby any good. I told her that people were trying to help her. The police officer could have taken her straight to jail but he did not.
I came back to Ottawa. About a month later I received a call from the police officer. The woman had never showed up at the police station and never showed up at court. There is now a double warrant for her arrest. What will happen to the child? That is my concern. Another young child will now go into foster care as a ward of the state. The whole vicious cycle will start over again because of drugs.
What should be done? I could take a hard line against the mother and say we should refuse to help such people. I could say that we give them all the help in the world but they do not want to take it and we should finally say enough is enough. However I am more concerned about the child because we have started the cycle all over again.
It is all too easy to make such judgments, especially if one has never seen how it is on the street. People here should look at the downtown east side of Vancouver or the core of Whalley in Surrey and see the junkies. They are called junkies and losers. I can tell hon. members that they are not. They have problems.
I was on a call one night, again on a ride along, to a house where a man had found his brother dead on the kitchen floor with a syringe beside him. He was in terrible shape. He was skinny, scrawny and dirty. I stood and looked at him and knew he was someone's son. It was the brother who called us. Let us never lose sight of that. We are not dealing with losers. We are dealing with people who have problems and we must do what we can to help them. Some want to be helped and will be helped. Others do not and we must deal with them too. They are all someone's kids.
I have kids of my own. The most traumatic incident in my life was the murder of my son. It was drug related. My son was not involved in drugs but the six people who attacked him and his friends that night were stoned. They had been doing drugs all day long. That is the human side of the issue.
I sense in this place a real mood of co-operation to do something about this issue. We all have different ideas, philosophies and approaches as to what should be done. However it is high time to bring those differences to the table, talk them out and do something. The country cannot take it any more.