Mr. Speaker, as my colleague indicated earlier, she comes from a city where crime is a serious issue and the safety of citizens is also of major concern.
The main purpose of a government is the safety and security of its citizens. If a government fails in that, then I think it has failed in every other aspect of government.
I will try to relate the questions of the hon. member to some of the comments Chuck Cadman made. In wrapping up the debate on his earlier bill, he indicated that he brought forward the issue of street racing for some of the victims. He named them in his speech, and I will not do that, but he indicated “and others [who] lost their lives to the deliberate actions of selfish, irresponsible and self-centred individuals in hot cars”.
I think that speaks volumes for the kind of guy Chuck was. He was very pointed about the people he wanted the legislation to target, but he also thought of the other side and worried about the people who had become victims. As we know, the issue of victims' rights is what brought him to the House, and we continue that. Many of his initiatives dealt with victims' rights.
This is about the issue of the rights of the criminal versus the rights of the victim. The best way to have rights for victims is for them not to become victims. The issue is this: if we are going to worry about the rights of victims, then let us not make them victims. Let us have laws in place that stop them from becoming victims. Let us have amendments to the Criminal Code such as those Chuck proposed and which this bill partially addresses. Then we will not have as many victims to deal with.
We can argue about the justice system and the sentencing that exists, but we feel that minimum sentences, with progressively stiffer sentencing, must be put into the Criminal Code in many places.
In closing, I will mention one instance when Chuck and I were together. In Banff we were at a caucus retreat right after we were elected for the first time in 1997. Somebody gave Chuck a message, calling him Mr. Cadman. When Chuck replied, he was referred to as “sir”. He had a pretty good sense of humour and he said, “Boy, that's sure not what they were calling me the last time I was in Banff”. In his earlier life he had played in a band and was hitchhiking across Canada in the 1960s. I think the authorities in Banff took exception to Mr. Cadman at that time, so it just goes to show us. At one time the authorities invited him to leave town and the next time he came back as a member of Parliament.
This is quite an incredible country when we think of the Chuck Cadman story.