Mr. Speaker, I have a question for my colleague as well. I appreciated her remarks. My reaction to this legislation and much of what is debated in the House is this: why do we not really get to and start debating the real causes of violence and crime in our society? We seem to be very superficial in a lot of discussions of this.
I want to zero in on something that has happened in Saskatchewan over the last 30 years or so. Saskatchewan now has the highest property crime rate in Canada and most of North America. The real concern of people in Saskatchewan is that we do not have enough police officers on our streets.
In some cities in the province, we have over 140 Criminal Code incidents per police officer. Now, if we pause and reflect on this statistic for a minute, we will realize that some of these police officers have to deal with a Criminal Code incident every second day of their working lives in the province. How can policemen do a good job of witnessing in the courts and of targeting the criminals in our community when they are so stressed out? They have to do all the paperwork as well, and the amount of paperwork involved in dealing with some of these Criminal Code incidents now is horrific.
It seems as though the Liberals want to get us talking about all kinds of extraneous issues when in fact we should be talking about targeting and improving the enforcement of law and order in our communities. I wonder if the member could comment on that.