I understand that. This is kind of an interesting dialogue with the Minister of Justice. I thank him for being here and paying attention to the debate. It is important and I know it is important to the minister as well.
As we start dealing with the Criminal Code, adding more elements, eliminating or maybe handcuffing the judiciary even further to the point where it has no choice but to incarcerate more and more people, it means having to build more jails. I do not know who will pay for that, when it is not in the federal jurisdiction.
How do we deal with it when the courts are clogged up? Even at the federal level, a very large number of judicial appointments have not been made. The court system is suffering because there are no judges. I do not know why the government is dragging its feet. These are all part of this.
What is the scheme of things? Are we saying that the judiciary does not really matter, that we are going to ram them through? Is it simply a matter of this is the charge, we have to dispose of this case quickly and the judges have no choice? If so, then all of a sudden we are not dealing with a comprehensive approach to the problem of street racing.
Where is the money for public education? Why is it not part of the bill? Where is the money for other preventive measures, such as resources to the policing authorities at any level of jurisdiction so they can integrate more fully into the communities to assist legislators in communicating to those who are of the demographic? It is not all around the country. There are some interesting studies that show where some of the problems are.
I have asked similar questions with regard to other bills. It seems that the government's solution to all the problems is to build more jails and throw more people into jail. I guess the housing program for Canada is we will create more jails.
There should be appropriate and proportionate penalties for people who commit serious crime. However, when we create five different offences and we have graduated or progressive penalties, all of a sudden it becomes very difficult to deal with the question of proportionality. I do not know how the judges will be able to deal with it.
One of the Conservative members has raised the issue that the CPIC system does not keep track of information with regard to whether a particular incident involved street racing. It would simply record the Criminal Code offence. I had to think about that.
I am not sure, but it would seem to me that if someone came up on a charge of breaking an existing law and the evidence was that it was part of an event qualifying as street racing, that information should be on the table with regard to the charge currently before the court. If this person had a record for speeding or negligence causing harm or death, or something like that, the question could also be posed about what the circumstances were, and the court records would show that. Therefore, even the CPIC issue probably is not a compelling enough matter to say that this is a deficiency and that is why we have to do this. I do not think it is a good enough reason.
I have a lot of questions. The member for London West has raised some very important issues. Should the bill pass second reading and go to committee, which I think it should, many of these questions should be seriously considered by the committee before the bill would pass further.