My colleague says we will bring it in.
We will include all of the 53 recommendations, not the 46 that the government decided to act upon in Bill C-19. We will include all the recommendations that were made, and we will get it passed before we unnecessarily call another election or prorogue Parliament.
When we look at the past decade of inaction of the Liberal government, the decade that I have been here as a member of Parliament, from the fall of 1993 to the spring of 2004, bills of this nature that Canadians have been crying out for have died. We have seen, time and time again, that they are sadly disappointed because we get a couple of years into a Parliament and the government prorogues Parliament. Everything dies. The government has to start all over again and reconstitute committees and get everything up to speed again. The next thing that happens is the government calls an unnecessary early election.
If an election is called in April, it will be the fourth time in the last 11 years that the country has gone to the polls early. It was not even three and a half years, in 1997, that Jean Chrétien called an early election. In 2000 the same thing happened. Now it will be the same thing again.
I think Canadians have lost their patience with the government. Canadians want to see legislation, such as Bill C-19, come about. The reality is I am not convinced we will get Bill C-19 through Parliament, the Senate and receive royal assent before the next election.
I would like to believe that it would happen. I know people who work with the prison system would like to see Bill C-19 become law, and they would like to see some of these changes in the prison system. I am not convinced the bill will become law if our so-called new Prime Minister is intent upon calling an unnecessary early election.
The major thrust of Bill C-19 is to tighten up some of the conditions that surround the conditional release of those who are incarcerated for crimes in Canada. The bill certainly falls partly into step with the Conservative Party of Canada's thinking on the issue. My party has been advocating for many years that parole should be harder to earn and easier to lose. We believe there should be no such thing as automatic parole in Canada.
If people are sentenced to a certain terms of incarceration, unless there are clear indications that the they have taken steps to improve themselves, that they truly repent for the crimes committed and that strong evidence shows the criminal ways have been corrected, there should be no parole. People should have to serve their total time of incarceration. We have been saying that parole should be harder to earn. There should be definite measures for people to come to the bar.
The doors should not be opened because too many people are in prison and it is costing the country too much money. Convicts are let out to prey on innocent Canadians again. We have seen time and time again where repeat offenders are out there preying on the most defenceless in our society, women and children and sadly, in some cases, very young children who are subject to horrendous crimes by those who were supposedly sentenced before and locked up. Then they were released by the Liberal government's lax laws.
Are we going to face this for another year, or two or three before the bill finally is passed into law and we can slowly start to see the changes happen in our criminal system?
When I speak on these types of matters, I always hesitate to call it a justice system. When I am back in Prince George—Peace River in my riding in northeastern British Columbia, I hear every day from someone who says we do not have a justice system in the country any more. People say we have a legal system that leans more toward the guilty and the criminals than it does to protecting the innocent in our society.
We support increased input from the community, including victims of crime. I am pleased to see that there is at least some mention of that in the bill and that we will move somewhat in that direction.
It is sad that it took the combined action of the official opposition over a period of months, sadly years, to get the government to even move this far. However, this agenda of change, as slight as it is, has been allowed to be thrown off by the agenda and the ambition of only one man, and that is the person who occupies the Prime Minister's chair.