Madam Speaker, I appreciate the member's question. It is certainly a very interesting one.
First, I would say that we have officials of the RCMP and other law enforcement agencies working together with their counterparts in the provinces and territories and they are the experts Canadians rely upon to protect and defend us from exactly what the member is saying. Although I am flattered that the member thinks I have all the right answers to all the issues, I wish that were so but it is not and I admit that.
However, when we talk about the issue of preventing a crime from happening in the first place it smacks of the same debate we have about immigration. People ask “Why do you let those criminals in?” They came into the country, they committed crimes and people ask why they were let in. I do not know what criminals look like when they come into the country. They do not have signs on them stating they are criminals. They may not be criminals when they come into Canada.
The member wants to argue that criminals can be profiled. We deal with this on the transport committee when we deal with airport and airline safety and we talk about profiling, but profiling by racial or other means will not be an effective way. It is a tool that we will be able to use, but again, there is no simple solution. I do not propose or suggest that there is a single way in which we can prevent this. We cannot guarantee prevention. The United States could not prevent September 11. It spends $10 billion a year on security and intelligence, et cetera, yet a horrific event took place involving people who had been legally in the United States for years. Not even their family members knew.
The member says we need a solution and that what they are proposing is the solution that would allow us to prevent crime. We certainly have the registry in place that lists people who have committed crimes. They may now be finished serving their sentences; we know they have a high recidivism rate and we can track them. That is our tool that lets us know about all the people who have committed crimes.
I think what the member was asking me was how we prevent someone who has not committed a sex crime yet from ever committing it. I just do not have the answer to that. I just do not know how a criminal can be profiled except on the basis of demographics or things like relationships with same or similar patterns. We have scientists to do that, but I am not sure whether I have heard anyone here articulate how someone's first crime can be prevented.