Mr. Speaker, I rise with pleasure today to commend my colleague from Nepean—Carleton on this initiative. It is an overdue initiative that we should have taken a long time ago.
The world as we knew it a couple of years ago completely changed after September 11. The people who responded first were the ambulance attendants, the firefighters and the police.
Just recently in my riding there was another devastation, and that was SARS. The people who were on the frontline were the nurses, the ambulance attendants, the firefighters and the police officers. It is these people who we have to recognize and we have to have legislation in place to protect them. If we do not have legislation that protects the frontline workers, who are there to protect us, then in my opinion we are failing.
I rise today to speak on the bill and to congratulate my colleague from Nepean--Carleton for bringing this forth. I just hope when it goes to committee that we look to extending it a little more to include ambulance attendants.
The act is an act to amend the Criminal Code, firefighters. It seeks to give greater protection to firefighters by amending five sections of the Criminal Code and creating two new criminal offences of aggravated assault and first degree murder when the victim is a firefighter acting in the line of duty.
Currently, section 231 of Canada's Criminal Code specifically refers to the death of a peace officer while acting in the line of duty. However we do not have similar legislation that provides a specific provision on increased penalties to deter criminal acts that jeopardize the lives or safety of fire workers. The bill would address this omission.
The bill would make it an indictable offence to intentionally or recklessly cause damage to property by fire explosion which results in the death of or serious bodily harm to firefighters acting in the line of duty. Anyone found guilty under this amendment would be sentenced to life imprisonment.
There is similar legislation in other parts of the world, especially in the United States, in the states of California, Nevada and Georgia to mention a few.
However I would like to leave some thoughts with my colleagues as we move the bill to committee stage. We should expand this to also include people who work as ambulance attendants. When there is an accident, when there is a fire, when there is any sort of emergency situation, we have the ambulance that responds, the firefighters and the police. We have moved one step to include in this bill the firefighters. When the bill goes to committee, we should seriously think about including the ambulance attendants, because as well as the firefighters they are the first people to respond when it is an emergency situation.
In closing, I would also like to lend my support to the bill and I thank my colleague from Nepean--Carleton for bringing this forth today. I express my sincere wishes that when it goes to committee, we look to include the ambulance attendants.