Mr. Speaker, clearly we know that under various motor vehicle statutes in the provinces there is the local power to regulate, so to speak, what can be done to a vehicle and what cannot be done.
Clearly at the municipal level there are bylaws and policies that could be enacted, but both of those examples, to answer the hon. member's question, come down to a matter of resources. All police forces will tell us, as the hon. member knows, that problem oriented policing is the wave of the future. This is what police officers now want to do. Rather than deal with a crime that has happened, they want to prevent crimes from happening. They want to get into the schools. In this case, they want to be out on the streets to prevent street racing events from occurring, more by their presence in a deterrent way rather than a “cover the whole area” way.
My hon. friend is absolutely right that resources to communities have to be allocated. Municipalities are the third level of government. They were doing extremely well under the Liberal-led infrastructure program. They sought and received mandates for programming of all sorts that made our cities more viable.
Instead of just trotting out a bill that has a catchy title and leads the public into a false sense of security, we have to ensure that in the future we back it up, that the government backs it up, perhaps at our urging, with the sufficient resources to enforce it and make the deterrent effects in it real, because if we are only relying on the definitions in a section of the Criminal Code, then these people, given their disrespect for judges generally, would be the first to say that is not a sufficient deterrent factor.
What has to be done is more vigilance in the community. I would think that a new government with any sort of freshness might have said, “Let us continue on the path of Bill C-65. Let us continue on the infrastructure program. Let us make our communities viable.” I would think it might have said, “Let us not cut funding from public safety and emergency preparedness. Let us not cut $1 billion of funding to the social fabric that keeps this community together”.
I would have thought that would have been one of the first orders of the day, but that is not what has happened here. The money is not flowing. Bills are being presented so that they can shock the public into an awareness of crimes that in certain cases are not as bad in prevalence as is advertised. Then there seem to be the white knight cure-alls by very poor, hollow and shallow legislation, which I believe Bill C-19 is.