Madam Speaker, I appreciate the question from my colleague. I have not been around as long as the member who has asked the question, having been here for only seven years. From the day I arrived on the scene here, it certainly baffled me and puzzled me as to why we did not have minimum sentences for a lot of things across the justice piece. I still do not know why. The Liberal mindset on this whole thing seems to be only maximums and no minimum. What happens then, of course, is that it is left up to the discretion of judges. For the most part, these individuals seems to have a kind of a liberal mindset as well; it is that very light slap on the wrist and they are out.
I do not disagree that case by case there sometimes should be a little range in some extenuating circumstances, but that can be done with minimum sentences. A minimum is put in. Between that minimum and the maximum the judge can come down in view of the circumstances and in view of the detail at hand. That is what we need to be doing, but the Liberal mindset is to do no minimums at all, just a maximum. Then there are judges that are soft at heart in court and on the benches day by day.
I will say this tongue in cheek. It is possible that the Liberals do not want minimum sentences, because we have government members over there who squander billions of tax dollars. As the member before me reminded us, close to $2 billion in the gun registry was squandered in a criminal waste of dollars there. We had it in HRDC when I was the critic there. It was unbelievable. There were no paper trails and no documentation; it was money out the door just like that, with phone calls only. Now we have it with the Quebec ad scam all over again. With that ad scam going on, maybe they do not want minimum sentences because people would be in the clink. They would be in jail. This is looking at another side of it, but unfortunately all through the justice system we do not have minimum sentences. I think that is a problem.
The member for Provencher was attorney general of Manitoba and he can give us a lot more detail on the disastrous kind of scenario that is set up when there are no minimums. We need to put in minimums so judges do not have that loosey-goosey latitude such that we do not get justice. There is no justice for victims when this kind of thing occurs.
We have seen it time and again. Someone has been a victim in a theft situation or in a murder situation. The family members receive no justice. They see a judge go in on a particular day and give the lightest sentence possible. That is plain wrong. That is not justice.
We need a change of government. We need a Conservative government that would have this approach and would provide the kinds of minimum sentences in respect of this kind of law and other laws throughout the Criminal Code in our country.