Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House today to support the bill of my colleague from Calgary on this very important issue; that of home invasions, break and enters involving people's homes and residences.
I just cannot resist prefacing my statements on the bill today by simply stating how jealous I am of this member and indeed of all the other members who in the last 10 years have been able to put forward private members' bills, have them debated and in some instances voted on in this place.
In the 10 and half years, and I cry in my soup again, I have never once been drawn. It seems so incredibly unfair to me because I have such excellent private members' bills, which resonate well with Canadians across the country because of some of the work I have done on them.
The one on standardizing the date format is an example. What does two, three, four mean? Is it 2002, March 4, or whatever? I had one that would at least standardize it for legal purposes and hopefully move Canadians toward some consistency on how they expressed dates in numerical format. I never got a chance to have it debated in the House.
I have another very excellent bill on EI, pertaining to students to ensure that they do not have to pay premiums on an insurance policy that they cannot possibly ever collect. Yet it never was drawn, and did not have the opportunity to have that debated in the House.
I have yet another bill on property taxes. We know that we are overtaxed in this country. Families are having a hard time making ends meet. Yet my very excellent private member's bill, which would exempt property taxes from income tax, the principle being a Canadian should not have to pay taxes on money earned for the sole purpose of paying taxes, never got a chance to be debated.
Here I am after 10 and half years, and I expect to be re-elected. However, in the event that changes, this will be my last opportunity to talk about my private member's bills, which I never got to talk about in a meaningful way in this place. There we go. I thank everyone in the House for all the sympathy I am getting.
Having used two minutes of the time on this bill to promote my own, at least I got it off my chest.
This bill is a most important one. We have somehow in our society increasingly lost the fabric of ethical and moral behaviour. It has become fashionable nowadays, and to our regret even within the high levels of government, to take things which are not our own.
I remember when I helped write the handbook for our private Christian school, of which I was the chairman when we started out. We had a little section in there which we copied from others that said that students should not bring valuables to school, the intent being that then they would not be subject to being stolen. I could not resist, working on that, inserting another statement in there that said, “Notwithstanding this, that students should not bring valuables to school, we still expect our students to not take things that do not belong to them”. Even if there is something there that is valuable, one should not be able to take it.
I remember, when I was youngster, my mother taught me a very important lesson. It was in a different language so the idiom does not fit at all. Basically the message was, “You cannot steal even so much as a thimble”.
I imagine many people here do not even know what a thimble is. A thimble was a little device, usually metal in those days. It was put on the finger of a person sewing so that if the needle went astray, it would prevent the finger from being injured. That was a thimble. It was a very small, almost worthless, device. However, she taught us, “You do not steal even a thimble”.
I remember also, when I was youngster, that our home on the prairies in Saskatchewan was never locked. In fact I do not remember if we even had a lock on the door. I remember my dad asking why we should lock the doors. He said that perhaps when we were not home, someone would come by who needed to use the phone.
That was the kind of trust we had among one another in rural Saskatchewan when I was growing up. We were taught both by word and by example, by our parents, by our schools and by our churches, that we did not take stuff that did not belong to us. It was just unthought of.
What a sharp contrast that is to what we are seeing in government these days. I find it despicable. A reporter back home asked me if I was not happy with everything happening here because, she said, we now have an excellent chance of forming the government. Surely Canadians will punish these Liberals for taking a whole bunch of money, she said, for misappropriating it and spending it in ways for which it was not intended--except that she used much stronger language. I have changed her language so that it is parliamentary.
I responded to her by saying, “No, as a matter of fact, it makes me incredibly sad”. It makes me incredibly sad that in our government this type of thing can be done. Where is it that people get the idea they can spend taxpayers' money, which is to be held there in trust? Where do they get the idea that they can just take it and use it for whatever personal purposes they have, with or without accounting and with or without justification? That should be so far from our thinking that it should just never happen.
However, I have digressed. We are talking about a bill that says there should be a harsher sentence imposed on people who engage in the act of breaking into people's homes and taking their things. Of course, one of the reasons for this, one of the large reasons, is that the invasion of one's personal space is such a violation of the person himself or herself.
I have talked with many people who have had their homes broken into. They have all said that they are not as concerned about the television or whatever because that can be replaced. In fact, the insurance company, after a deduction, will replace the things that are taken.
What people are really concerned about is the fact that they have had their personal space violated. We used to say that a man's home is his castle; it is one of the places where we have the privacy of our home, our families, and we do not expect it to be invaded by a stranger with all sorts of intents that could be very devastating.
I will never forget the case of Barb Danelesko in Edmonton. It is now a fairly old case from probably seven or eight years ago. Three young offenders broke into her house. She thought it was the dog that wanted to go out, as dogs sometimes do in the middle of the night. She left her husband in his bed, the children upstairs, and she went downstairs to let the dog out, she thought. Unfortunately, these three young thugs grabbed a knife from the kitchen cupboard and they murdered her. This happened because they were in the process of breaking in. They were young offenders. We were not even permitted to know their names. I believe they are no longer serving a sentence for this crime. In essence, they got away with it. This is the type of thing that can happen.
This bill has as its primary goal to put a large deterrence on breaking and entering into homes. It would require a minimum mandatory sentence of at least two years for individuals who have been found guilty of a second or subsequent offence.
We are still letting them get away with the first offence, so let the Liberals vote in favour of this bill because they are always the ones who want to be soft on crime. We are being soft on the first offence, but we hope that after the first offence for which a person is convicted that person would learn the lesson and never do it again. If people have not learned the lesson and do it again, hence the subsequent or the second offence, then we say a minimum of two years.
This will do two things. First, it will act as a deterrent. Second, it will prevent that individual from continuing this activity for at least two years.