Madam Speaker, I have sat in this House for a long time and I have heard good speeches and bad speeches but that sort of fearmongering degrades the House of Commons. I do not think I have ever heard more false morality and more claim to principles in a more rambling, disjointed tirade since I came into this House. It truly is disgraceful. I find it disgraceful that a member so new would sink to those depths in connection with serious legislation and occasionally mention it in the context of Chuck Cadman and enfold Chuck Cadman in his arms. I do not know in what sort of world he lives but he certainly seems to be a very paranoid person.
I have the figures here for crimes committed in the last decade or more for the province of Ontario, my own province. They are not my statistics. I did not invent them and I did not see them in a newspaper. These are the statistics from Statistics Canada.
Our fearmongering friend over there is talking about our children not going to Canada's Wonderland in Ontario out of fear. He knows, or at least he should know, as he is a member of Parliament now and perhaps should remember that from time to time when he is posturing in this particular way, that the overall crime rate in the province of Ontario is at an all-time low. It reached a peak in the early 1990s and has gone down every year since and is now a fraction of what it was before.
This is not to say that there are not serious crimes going on out there. I am simply pointing out, if he looks at the figures, that serious crimes are down perhaps a third of what they were at their peak in the early 1990s when we first came in.
I regret the recent spate of handgun homicides in metropolitan Toronto. It is a terrible thing and it is something we have to deal with but I do not think it has to be dealt with through savage penalties, although they certainly should be the most severe penalties. We need to deal with those communities and do what we can about it. Nevertheless, homicide rates in Ontario reached the world record peak in 1991 and 1992 and have come down virtually every year since. They have gone up very slightly in the last year but they are still a fraction of what they were.
I mentioned property crimes earlier. They, too, are down.
Violent crimes in the province of Ontario, which reached a peak in the years 1991, 1992 and 1993, have come down every year since.
What about offensive weapons crimes. He talked about gun control. It is the same thing. At the beginning of 1994 offensive weapons crimes were at 75 per 100,000 and they are now down to 40 per 100,000 in the province of Ontario.
We should do everything we can to stop every offensive weapons crime. We should work with the communities and punish those involved but we should not go around telling our people and our children that our communities are more dangerous now than they were.
My colleague pretends, in this meandering rhetoric that he has, to having high principles. I represent a rural riding and I have had my problems with the gun registry, as many other people have. However his claim that the gun registry cost $2 billion is not just a lie, it is a big lie. It is something that absolutely cannot be proven. The cost of the gun registry is nothing like $2 billion. It is not even $1 billion. It is not even over $100 million.
Good gun control costs money over a period of 10 years. The registry costs nothing like that. I support expenditures on gun control in Canada so we can continue to bring crime rates down.
Our colleague should apologize for putting fear into the hearts of Ontario families and children by imagining a level of crime that simply does not exist.