Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his honesty about past misdeeds. I must admit I was not quite as shocked as some might be, having gotten to know him in the past year.
I do think that it speaks to the issue of proportionality when he talks about joyriding versus the issue of organized criminals being involved in tampering, obliterating and violating vehicle identification numbers.
I mentioned my own case of being at home on a January night after my wife and I had just brought our child back from the hospital. He had sustained a small injury. We had parked the car in the garage. Then we woke up at 1:30 a.m. to the sound of the police knocking on our door to tell us that our vehicle had been found some distance away. Our personal experience is all that we could think about at that point in time and about the criminal justice system.
There have been a lot of improvements and the crime rate has in general gone down, as my hon. colleague mentioned. However, it does not in any way reduce the burden of ensuring that we continue to do everything we can. In a small way my family and I suffered a minor inconvenience. In a larger way there are people such as Jason MacCullough of my community who was murdered in 1999 and for whom the community had a walk against violence in his memory last week. Anyone who is a victim of crime is one too many.
We have made some progress in this country, but we are also sensitive to the fact that we must do more to protect Canadians. At the end of the day it is one of the things that they most solemnly look to their government to do on their behalf and we are doing it.